Category Archives: War and Peace

That ‘unrepentant’ Colin Powell

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You may recall that recently, I made the argument that William Ayers should not have been paid to come to a public university in South Carolina, that in fact he should be considered persona non grata in our fair state.

The crux of my argument was the fact that Ayers, by his own account, is an unrepentant terrorist.

So you can imagine my great sense of irony when someone on the anti-war left objected to Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama on the grounds that the general himself is "unrepentant:"

As CNN reported yesterday, Powell remains totally unrepentant both about his own critical role pushing us to war. For instance, he claims to have tried to stop the war, five years after giving the single most important (and discredited) speech in building the public case for war. He now claims he wants to see the war end, but it’s difficult to trust the integrity of a man who denies even the most basic facts of his public involvement in creating the crisis in the first place. That Obama now seems to reflexively trust Powell suggests not foreign policy prudence from the Democratic nominee, but knee-jerk ignorance — and worse, a potential to abdicate the very antiwar themes he’s run on for so long.

So what do you make of that?

While the two groups by no means correspond precisely, I imagine that there is a significant overlap between people who are untroubled by Ayers being unrepentant for plotting to bomb the Pentagon and those who ARE troubled that Gen. Powell is "unrepentant" about his role in the run-up to Iraq. In fact, some of our friends here on the blog may reside in that overlap.

But perhaps I’m wrong about that. I hope I am.

Speaking of which, I thought the general did a good job in his endorsement of Sen. Obama. It was better reasoned than the Tribune‘s.

Comparing McCain now with the campaign against him in 2000

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Speaking of stuff that was on today’s op-ed page, did you read the other piece, the one by the two profs — no, wait, just one of them was a prof (at Furman); the other might more accurately be termed a "writer" — about how that awful John McCain ought to "know better" than to criticize Barack Obama over his associations because of the way he, McCain, was treated in the 2000 GOP primary here? An excerpt:

Here we go again. Politicians falling in the polls are resorting to
character slurs and political smears. To the people of South Carolina
it’s deja vu — all over again.

Last
week John McCain’s campaign launched a web advertisement about Barack
Obama’s ties to a “domestic terrorist.” Sarah Palin claimed that Obama
sees America “as being so imperfect … that he’s palling around with
terrorists who would target their own country” and repeatedly commented
on Obama’s “association” with “terrorists.”

It is a chilling indictment. But false.

Such
sad irony. In the 2000 primaries, after John McCain defeated a heavily
favored George Bush by 19 percentage points in New Hampshire, the Texas
governor’s campaign was in trouble. If Bush lost the S.C. primary,
where his opponent was already popular, he had little chance of
stopping McCain. Something had to be done. Anything.

What did you think of the piece? Personally, I thought the premise was silly and way off-base. So why did I run it? Well, we run all sorts of views on the op-ed page, and I think a lot of them are silly and off-base. That’s all part of the public conversation. Specifically, I chose to leave this one on the page for two reasons:

  1. There are a lot of people criticizing McCain these days along precisely these lines, and this was practically a textbook case of it. I especially like the tut-tutting tone attesting to how very disappointed the authors were in McCain ("Such sad irony.") — that is a trait
    common to these sorts of assertions. So this was a good example of
    that, and written from an SC angle. I thought it such a good example that I even overlooked the painfully trite bit about "deja vu all over again." (If only poor Yogi had a nickel for every time, huh?)
  2. It was good to run it as a counterpoint to the Charles Krauthammer piece we ran on Friday, which stuck up for McCain over the Ayers stuff, etc., and criticized him only for having been too fussy to bring this stuff up long before.

Why did I think it silly and off-base? Oh come ON, people! Raising the subject of Bill Ayers — even in clumsy, demagogic language such as "palling around with terrorists" — is in NO WAY like making up a lie about John McCain’s adopted daughter that is specifically and particularly and reprehensibly designed to appeal to the worst racist instincts in the S.C. electorate. Say whatever else you want to say about it, but that’s an extreme stretch. It is ONLY logical if you mean that saying something that reflects poorly upon an opponent’s character is the same as any other instance of doing so. Which is silly.

The authors’ perception of moral equivalence seems to lie in the fact that they believe this, too is "false." But I missed the part where they, or anyone else, has demonstrated that. To the contrary, Obama has had dealings with Bill Ayers, and while the exact nature or extent of said relationship remains fuzzy, what little we know indicates that it was more friendly than, say, inimical. So what you’re left with is quibbling over the quantitative meaning of "palling around," and the generally incendiary, hamhanded style of the assertion by that silver-tongued wordsmith Sarah Palin, or the coarseness of crowds who eat that stuff up.

Or do you think that Bill Ayers is NOT an unrepentant terrorist? If so, I need to see the evidence. Because what I’ve seen argues to the contrary.

Tell you what. I’m going to stop being shy and tell you what I really think — I disagree both with Messrs. Manuto and O’Rourke AND with Krauthammer. I just told you why I disagree with the first two gentlemen. The part I disagree with Krauthammer over is the idea that McCain should have been hammering on this stuff all along. Personally, I wish he weren’t bringing it up NOW. It’s not going to accomplish anything positive — it just speaks to the great divide in our politics left over from Vietnam. That was a battle we didn’t think we were going to fight in this campaign.

And here’s where there is a kernel of a point in the O’Rourke-Manuto piece; they just spoiled it by grotesquely exaggerating it. And it’s this: this is not consistent with the style that has make McCain so popular with those of us who love to watch both sides in the culture wars get mad at him. There’s nothing WRONG with mentioning Ayers; it’s not a foul. But it’s not the style of play we go to McCain for.

There are better ways to say what the McCain campaign has been getting at with the Ayers stuff. For instance, it was stated fairly well in a piece in The Wall Street Journal last week (although the overall thrust of the piece, headlined "News Flash: The Media Back Obama" is in itself another tired cliche):

…Mr. Obama… is the leading exponent of the idea that our lost nation requires rehabilitation in the eyes of the world — and it is the most telling difference between him and Mr. McCain. When asked, in one of the earliest debates of the primary, his first priority should he become president, his answer was clear. He would go abroad immediately to make amends, and assure allies and others in the world America had alienated, that we were prepared to do all necessary to gain back their respect.

It is impossible to imagine those words coming from Mr. McCain. Mr. Obama has uttered them repeatedly one way or another and no wonder. They are in his bones, this impossible-to-conceal belief that we’ve lost face among the nations of the world — presumably our moral superiors. He is here to reform the fallen America and make us worthy again of respect. It is not in him, this thoughtful, civilized academic, to grasp the identification with country that Mr. McCain has in his bones — his knowledge that we are far from perfect, but not ready, never ready, to take up the vision of us advanced by our enemies. That identification, the understanding of its importance and of the dangers in its absence — is the magnet that has above all else drawn voters to Mr. McCain….

The thing is, it’s impossible to imagine a campaign event for John McCain hosted by Bill Ayers. McCain has done a great deal over the years to reach out to people who were opposed to the war in Vietnam, and even to his former captors — he has acted heroically to normalize relations with their country. But there’s no way he would have been associated with a guy who’s proud of HIS association with the bombings of the NYC police HQ, the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon.

Barack Obama HAS been associated with that guy, however fuzzy (and subject to debate) that connection may be. And that speaks to a difference in worldview. But I doubt we’ll ever have an intelligent discussion of that difference.

Scattered thoughts on the debate

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First, I’ll refer you to video from the panel discussion last night, where you will find Joshua Gross and others offering their thoughts.

I was wiped out last night, and didn’t stick around to talk to folks after the discussion ended a little before midnight. Long day. I hope folks didn’t think I was rude, but I’d been fighting a cold and had no resources left. I’d told everyone at the start that I was just there to observe; it was the newsroom’s show.

On my way out I did run into our own Norm Ivey, who was there sporting an Obama ’08 T-shirt. You can see some of Norm’s recent comments on this post, and this one, and this one.

As I said last night from my Treo, I don’t think this was a debate that changed any minds — although Norm raised the interesting point that the candidates were speaking to voters who hadn’t paid attention until now, and that on that score he thought McCain did better. I can’t say, because I wasn’t looking for that while I watched.

Nor do I have an overall observation or theme. I thought each candidate exhibited some strengths and weaknesses, as follows:

McCain strengths:

  • Having been right about the Surge. There’s so much more to that than the fact that by sending those extra troops, and using them properly, we created a stituation in which we can start talking about drawing down and leaving behind a stable Iraq. It goes to the core fact that McCain was right, and Bush was wrong, for four years before the president finally got rid of Rumsfeld and switched to a strategy that would work. This narrative (and so many other things) gives the lie to the Democrats’ "McCain equals Bush" nonsense. It communicates that he won’t give up on our nation’s commitments, or let American blood be spent for nought. And it shows he knows the differences between approaches likely to work, and those not to.
  • The constant reminders of his long experience with these issues. The answer he gave to the "bomb, bomb Iran" remark was his best moment. He gave the history of his judgments of major decisions involving the deployment of our military, from being against sending the Marines to Lebanon in 83 to backing Clinton on Bosnia in defiance of many in his party. It strongly suggested the thought, "Oh, yeah — and Obama just got to the Senate…"
  • His long-held opposition to earmarks and wasteful spending, and clear willingness to use his veto and the bully pulpit to fight it. Lehrer was irritating with his constant hammering on "if the bailout passes, what will you give up," but McCain gave the best answer.
  • The reminder that he and Biden pushed through the 9/11 commission, again in spite of the Bush administration.
  • His answer on the initial economic question, emphasizing how encourage he was that Democrats and Republicans were working together finally, made Obama’s answer about "failed policies" of Republicans look petty.

McCain weaknesses

  • One overrides all others, and he did it repeatedly and intentionally — his condescending references to Obama "not understanding" issues. Obama is a smart man, but even if he weren’t, McCain’s constant attempts to put him down would have been unseemly, and beneath him. Yes, I believe there are some things Obama "doesn’t get," but that’s not a gentlemanly way of putting it, and I’m betting it created a lot of sympathy for Obama. Most of all, it was inconsistent with the sort of man McCain is — he is usually deeply humble and gracious to those who disagree with him (something that I think is all the more admirable because of his natural temper; he has chosen to be mild in disagreement, and it speaks well of him). This was artificial and offensive, and whoever talked him into taking this approach should not be listened to again.
  • As we knew already, he is not as smoothly articulate as his opponent. He lost himself in his sentences a number of times, particularly toward the end, and that did him no good.

Obama strengths

  • His argument that Iraq has sapped our resources to the point that we can’t "project force" where we need to elsewhere in the world. Yes, Democrats have long said this in regard to Afghanistan, but he took it beyond that. This remains the strongest argument that critics of our involvement in Iraq have, and he used it well, doing an excellent job of distancing himself from those in his party who are reflexively against ANY military action, and that’s something he has to do to be credible as a candidate for commander in chief.
  • Beyond exhausting the military, he also made a good argument that Iraq has enabled and strengthened Iran — a familiar argument, but he presented it well.
  • His gracious acknowledgment of the courageous leadership McCain showed in standing up to the administration on torture. The normal Democratic position is that McCain "caved" on the issue, and is no better than Bush. That’s a deeply unfair characterization, and Obama showed himself to be above that.
  • More articulate, as always (see "McCain weaknesses").

Obama weaknesses

  • Continuing to be wrong on the Surge, and not acknowledging it, hurts him with everyone else except his base. Trouble is, that base will go nuclear if he acknowledges it. (The thing is that logically, he could still assert it was wrong to go INTO Iraq, but that the Surge was the thing to do.) The "worked beyond wildest expectations" earlier helped, but McCain turned that against him well, noting that it was no surprise to HIM.
  • Probably no one else noticed this, but when he tried to excuse his failure to hold hearings on Afghanistan (a weakness in itself), he said that’s not the practice on the committee chaired by his veep candidate. That made me fully realize, in a way I hadn’t before, just how upside-down the ticket is in terms of qualifications — the number two guy on the ticket is the number one guy’s CHAIRMAN. If I had been McCain, I might have succumbed to the temptation to point out the irony.
  • This is a silly one, but the "professor" was much in evidence in his pedantic insistence on trying to pronounce foreign names and terms the way natives of those countries might, but doing it with such an obvious American accent (the bad guys in Afghanistan were the "Tollybon," said as only an English-shaped tongue could say it). Maybe you couldn’t hear it; it’s something from my childhood when I lived in South America and was bilingual — even though I can hardly speak it now, hearing other gringos try to be SO proper in their pronunciation and fail still grates on my ear.

Yeah, I know — I gave McCain more strengths, and Obama more weaknesses. But each item does not have equal value, and overall, I think they came out even. That’s bad news for McCain, because the subject of most of the debate was his personal area of strength, and he needed to clearly win this one.

I don’t think he did that, but then I can’t speak for all independent voters.

Meanwhile, back in the world: We’re now having firefights with Pakistan

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Folks who have been looking back and forth between the presidential election and the crisis on Wall Street, only to see the two merge, may be surprised to know that things have gotten hairier over on the Afghan-Pakistan border. We’ve been sending commandos and other assets after al Qaida over there (you may recall that’s where Osama bin Laden is supposed to be hiding out), and Pakistan has been getting madder and madder over it.

And now, apparently, we’re shooting at each other … although Pakistan claims it was just shooting flares at our helicopters — to start with, anyway .

I just thought I’d mention this in case there is a debate tomorrow night, and in case anybody thought there wasn’t anything important besides the economy to talk about.

The passing of Yuri Nosenko

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Boy, we really have been preoccupied in this country with this presidential election, haven’t we? Me included.

Somehow, I had missed the fact that Yuri Nosenko had died, way back on Aug. 23, until I finally saw the obit in LAST week’s Economist.

Two things to say about Comrade Nosenko’s passing:

  1. Did you ever see the 1986 made-for-TV movie about him (I think it was on HBO), starring Tommy Lee Jones? Excellent.
  2. I often think of Mr. Nosenko when I hear from the antiwar people who talk about mistaken WMD intel as having been "lies," rather than a case of the administration simply believing the wrong intel.

The Nosenko case is a classic example of the fact that in intelligence, you often have to choose WHICH intel you are going to believe. After we locked up Mr. Nosenko for years, interrogating him under horrific conditions that one might choose to call "torture" without stretching the meaning of the word, believing him to be a KGB plant meant to discredit another defector (and to absolve the Kremlin of the JFK assassination), we finally rehabilitated him, said he was OK, gave him a check and a new identity.

But to this day, one can probably get a fierce debate going among folks with high security clearances as to which set of assumptions about Mr. Nosenko was the one based on lies.

In fact, the only reason we say he is dead is because the authorities TELL US he’s dead. We don’t even know what name he was living under "somewhere in the Southern United States." As the NYT reported:

Claire George, a former C.I.A. deputy director of operations, told The
Washington Post, which first reported Mr. Nosenko’s death on Wednesday,
that Mr. Nosenko’s treatment “was a terrible mistake.” But, he added,
“you can’t be in the spy business without making mistakes.”

Seven years on

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Seven years ago this week, I was filled with optimism. Not everyone responded to the events of 9/11/01 that way, but I did.
    Yes, I was mindful of the horrific loss of human life. But nothing could change that; my optimism rose from what I believed would come next.
    Surely, I thought, we could set aside foolishness and use the unprecedented resources our nation possessed — military power, certainly, but also our economic dominance and perhaps most of all the strength of the ideas upon which our nation is built — to make future 9/11s less likely.
    By “foolishness” I mean a number of things. Take, for instance, our insatiable appetite for oil produced by nations that consider fostering al-Qaidas as being consistent with their interests. (Joe Biden has a great speech he’s given around South Carolina for years about the incalculable opportunity wasted by George W. Bush on Sept. 12, when, instead of urging us to every sacrifice and every effort toward transforming the energy underpinnings of our economy, he told us to go shopping and delegate the war fighting to the professionals.)
    But the greatest foolishness was the pointless, poisonous partisanship that militated against focusing the nation’s resources toward solving any problem. It should have been the easiest to set aside. It’s not that I read too much into those Democrats and Republicans singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps; it’s that partisanship is based on considerations that are so much less substantial than the realities of 9/11. Those attacks should have melted away party differences like the noonday tropical sun burning away a morning mist.
    But partisanship is an industry that employs thousands of Americans — in the offices of Beltway advocacy groups, in the studios of 24/7 cable TV “news” channels, in party headquarters, on congressional staffs and in the White House. And they are much better focused on that which sustains them — polarization for its own sake — than the rest of us are on the interests we hold in common.
    They lay low for awhile, but as most of us went back to shopping while our all-volunteer military went to war, the polarization industry went back to work dividing us, hammer and tongs. They tapped the powerful emotions of 9/11 to their purposes, and led us to levels of bitterness that none of us had seen in our lifetimes.
    But what did I expect to happen, seven years ago? Nothing less than using our considerable influence to build a better world. Go ahead, laugh. All done now?
    In an editorial the Sunday after the attacks, I wrote that “We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term — military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.” That meant abandoning a lot of foolishness.
    Take, for instance, our policy toward the Mideast. Our goal had been stability above all. Prop up some oppressive regimes and come to terms with others; just don’t let anything interfere with the smooth flow of petroleum. Saddam upsets the equilibrium by invading Kuwait and threatening Saudi Arabia? Send half a million troops to restore the status quo ante, but don’t topple his regime, because that would upset the balance.
    But 9/11 showed us that the status quo was extraordinarily dangerous. It produced millions of disaffected young men, frustrated and humiliated by the oppression that we propped up. Things needed to change.
    Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed part of the equation well in Cairo in 2005: “For 60 years the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East — and we achieved neither.” The New York Times’ Tom Friedman took it further, speaking of the need to “drain swamps,” the figurative kind that bred terrorists the way literal bogs breed malaria.
    But instead of leading a national effort on every possible front — the military speaks of our national power as being based in the acronym DIME, for “Diplomatic,” “Information,” “Military” and “Economic” resources (those who put their lives on the line are wise about these things) — we’ve spent most of the past seven years bickering over the military aspect alone. This argument between the antiwar left and the hawkish right has so weakened the national will to do anything that we came close to failure in Iraq, could still fail in Afghanistan and are helpless in the face of Russian aggression in the Caucasus and Iranian nuclear ambition.
    So how do I feel about our national prospects today, given all that has happened? Forgive me, but I am once again (cautiously) optimistic, based on a number of signs, from small to momentous:

  • Dramatic improvement in Iraq — thanks largely to the “surge” that he belatedly embraced after four years of floundering — has changed the national conversation, and led President Bush to speak of starting the process of moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, the battleground even the partisans can agree upon.
  • Last week Secretary Rice sat down to solidify a new understanding with Moammar Quaddafi of Libya, the once-intractable sponsor of terror whose mind was changed by the Iraq invasion.
  • The choice for president is between two men who gained their respective parties’ nominations by speaking to the deep national desire to move beyond partisan paralysis. (I realize they would lead in different directions. But if either can lead a national consensus toward implementing his best ideas, we will be better off — if only for having had the experience of agreeing with each other for once.)

Yes, the threads of hope to which I cling are delicate, and cynics will regard me as laughably foolish. But the alternative is not to hope. And that, given the potential of this nation, would be the ultimate foolishness.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

DOH! We forgot the ‘national will’ part!

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Following up on my call earlier to Dave looking for resources about DIME, he e-mailed me something he got from a friend who teaches at West Point:

DIME is a list of the instruments of national power:

The ability of the United States to achieve its national
strategic objectives is dependent on the effectiveness of the US Government
(USG) in employing the instruments of national power. These instruments of
national power (diplomatic, informational, military, and economic), are normally
coordinated by the appropriate governmental officials, often with National
Security Council (NSC) direction. They are the tools the United States uses to
apply its sources of power, including its culture, human potential, industry,
science and technology, academic institutions, geography, and national
will.

To which I responded,

National will! We forgot about national will! DOH! That’s the problem!…

And kidding aside, that IS the problem. As long as our conversations about strategy is grounded in the kind of political vocabulary we’ve heard for the last few years — mostly based either in trying to appeal to bases or win elections — we’re not going to be able to assemble the national will to focus all of our resources toward international goals that are beneficial not only to this country, but to the world at large.

Where George W. Bush has failed, more than in any other way, is in assembling that national will and leading us to act upon it.

Unfortunately, so far I haven’t seen either McCain or Obama state a whole strategy that the nation can get behind — that is, something that goes beyond the either-or oversimplification of "soft power vs. hard power." If they did it and I missed it, I’d appreciate a heads-up.

9/11 plus seven years

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The way we split up duties on the editorial board, Cindi Scoppe handles scheduling. For instance, she maintains "the budget," which has nothing to do with money — it’s newspaperese for a written summary of what you plan to publish in upcoming editions.

A couple of weeks back, Cindi put a bold notice on the budget to this effect: 9/11 ???? Beyond that, she’s mentioned it a couple of times. Each time I’ve sort of grunted. The most recent time was Monday, and I felt compelled to be somewhat more articulate. I explained that I hate marking anniversaries. Such pieces are so artificial. The points one might make 365 days after an event should not differ from what you would say the day before, or the day after — if you’re saying the right things.

Nevertheless, I’m kicking around a column idea, one that I’m not sure will work. If I can pull it together between now and Wednesday morning, we can run it Thursday.

Actually, it’s a couple of column ideas. One would simply be a bullet list of things to think about: the movement of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan would be one bullet, another would be Osama bin Laden, another would be the state of the NATO alliance — or something like that. Something acknowledging that it’s tough to isolate One Thing to say on a topic so complex.

The other would be to hark back to the editorial I wrote for the Sunday after 9/11 — 9/16/01. In it, I set out a vision of how the U.S. needed to engage the world going forward. A key passage:

We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.

There’s nothing profound about it — it seems as obvious to me as the need to breathe. But America is a long way from embracing the concept holistically. We seem to lack the vocabulary for it, or something.

A couple of months ago, former State staffer Dave Moniz — who is now a civilian employee of the Air Force with the civilian rank of a brigadier general, operating out of Washington — brought a couple of Air Force guys to talk broadly about that service and how it’s doing these days. In passing, one of them mentioned the concept of DIME (which refers to "Diplomatic," "Information," "Military" and "Economic" as the four main elements of national power), which apparently is widely understood among military officers these days, even though it doesn’t enter much into civilian discussions.

We’ve wasted much of the last seven years arguing about the legitimacy of the exercise of military power, to the exclusion of the other parts. It’s sucked up all the oxygen. Occasionally we talk about "soft power," but as some sort of alternative, not as a necessary complement. And as long as our discussions are thus hobbled, it’s tough for us ever to get to the point of accomplishing the overall goals of making the world safer for liberal democracies:

    But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.
    We must cease to regard "nation-building" as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.

With rescue workers still seeking survivors in the smoking rubble of the twin towers, it didn’t occur to me that the military part would be such a political barrier. I couldn’t see then how quickly political partisanship would reassert itself, or how quickly we would split into a nation of Iraq hawks and the antiwar movement.

I’m encouraged that the surge in Iraq has been successful enough — Gen. Petraeus was thinking in DIME terms as he suppressed the insurgencies — that we are prepared to redeploy troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. (Which reminds me of something I often thought over the last few years when antiwar types would talk about "bringing our troops home." I didn’t see how anyone would think we could do that, with the battles still to be fought against the Taliban. The most compelling argument those opposed to our involvement in Iraq had was that it consumed resources that should be devoted to Afghanistan. Obviously, as we turn from one we turn more to the other — not because we want to exhaust our all-volunteer military with multiple deployments, but because until we have a larger military, we have no choice — no credible person has asserted that Afghanistan is a "war of choice.")

You know what — I’m just going to copy that whole Sept. 16, 2001, editorial here. Maybe it will inspire y’all to say something that will help me write a meaningful column. Maybe not. But I share it anyway… wait, first I’ll make one more point: What the editorial set out was not all that different from the concept of "Forward Engagement" that Al Gore had set out in the 2000 campaign to describe his foreign policy vision — although after he unveiled it, he hardly mentioned it. Too bad that between his own party’s post-Vietnam isolationism and the GOP’s aversion to "nation-building," we’ve had trouble coalescing around anything like this.

Anyway, here’s the editorial:

THE STATE
IN THE LONG TERM, U.S. MUST FULLY ENGAGE THE WORLD
Published on: 09/16/2001
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: A8

IF YOU HAD MENTIONED the words "missile defense shield" to the terrorists who took over those planes last Tuesday, they would have laughed so hard they might have missed their targets.
    That’s about the only way it might have helped.
    Obviously, America is going to have to rethink the way it relates to the rest of the world in the 21st century. Pulling a high-tech defensive blanket over our heads while wishing the rest of the world would go away and leave us alone simply isn’t going to work.
    We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.
    Essentially, we have wasted a decade.
    After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union crumbled, there was a vacuum in our increasingly interconnected world, a vacuum only the United States could fill. But we weren’t interested. After half a century of intense engagement in world affairs, we turned inward. Oh, we assembled and led an extraordinary coalition in the Gulf War – then let it fall apart. We tried to help in Somalia, but backed out when we saw the cost. After much shameful procrastination, we did what we should have done in the Balkans, and continue to do so. We tried to promote peace in the Mideast, then sort of gave up. But by and large, we tended our own little garden, and let the rest of the world drift.
    We twice elected a man whose reading of the national mood was "It’s the economy, stupid." Republicans took over Congress and started insisting that America would not be the world’s "policeman."
    Beyond overtures to Mexico and establishing a close, personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, President Bush initially showed little interest in foreign affairs.
    Meanwhile, Russia and China worked to expand their own spheres of influence, Europe started looking to its own defenses, and much of the rest of the world seethed over our wealth, power and complacency.
    Well, the rest of the world isn’t going to simply leave us alone. We know that now. On Tuesday, we woke up.
    In the short term, our new engagement will be dominated by military action, and diplomacy that is closely related to military aims. It won’t just end with the death or apprehension of Osama bin Laden. Secretary of State Colin Powell served notice of what will be required when he said, "When we’re through with that network, we will continue with a global assault against terrorism in general." That will likely mean a sustained, broad- front military effort unlike anything this nation has seen since 1945. Congress should get behind that.
    At the moment, much of the world is with us in this effort. Our diplomacy must be aimed at maintaining that support, which will not be easy in many cases.
    Beyond this war, we must continue to maintain the world’s most powerful military, and keep it deployed in forward areas. Our borders will be secure only to the extent that the world is secure. We must engage the help of other advanced nations in this effort. We must invest our defense dollars first and foremost in the basics – in keeping our planes in the air, our ships at sea and our soldiers deployed and well supported.
    We must always be prepared to face an advanced foe. Satellite intelligence and, yes, theater missile defenses will play roles. But the greatest threat we currently face is not from advanced nations, but from the kinds of enemies who are so primitive that they don’t even have airplanes; they have to steal ours in order to attack us. For that reason, we must beef up our intelligence capabilities. We need spies in every corner of the world, collecting the kind of low-tech information that espiocrats call "humint" – human intelligence. More of that might have prevented what happened last week, in ways that a missile shield never could.
    But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.
    We must cease to regard "nation-building" as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.
    This may sound like an awful lot to contemplate for a nation digging its dead out of the rubble. But it’s the kind of challenge that this nation took on once before, after we had defeated other enemies that had struck us without warning or mercy. Look at Germany and Japan today, and you will see what America can do.
    We must have a vision beyond vengeance, beyond the immediate guilty parties. And we must embrace and fulfill that vision, if we are ever again to enjoy the collective peace of mind that was so completely shattered on Sept. 11, 2001.

Woodward: ‘Surge’ not the main factor

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The WashPost is touting its serialization of Bob Woodward’s latest book, The War Within. Here’s a summary of today’s installment:

In the fall of 2006, the nation’s military leaders found themselves badly out of sync with the White House over what to do in Iraq, with one of the Joint Chiefs telling Bush, “You’re stressing the force, Mr. President, and these kids just see deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan for the indefinite future.” But as the surge progressed in 2007, violent attacks began to drop dramatically in Iraq. Was the surge the reason for this reversal? Knowledgeable officials say the influx of troops was just one of four factors, and not the most consequential one.

By the way, in a quick skim of the excerpt, I did not find the reference to the "four factors" mentioned in the summary sent to me today. But I did find them in a WashPost news story from three days ago:

The book also says that the U.S. troop "surge" of 2007, in which President Bush sent nearly 30,000 additional U.S. combat forces and support troops to Iraq, was not the primary factor behind the steep drop in violence there during the past 16 months.

Rather, Woodward reports, "groundbreaking" new covert techniques enabled U.S. military and intelligence officials to locate, target and kill insurgent leaders and key individuals in extremist groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Woodward does not disclose the code names of these covert programs or provide much detail about them, saying in the book that White House and other officials cited national security concerns in asking him to withhold specifics.

Overall, Woodward writes, four factors combined to reduce the violence: the covert operations; the influx of troops; the decision by militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to rein in his powerful Mahdi Army; and the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and allied with U.S. forces.

Did Obama’s position on Iraq just change?

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Michelle Obama just said* something that made me say, "huh?" She was listing all the wonderful things that would happen if her husband were elected — the arrival of the millennium, dogs and cats living together in peace, the usual hyperbole you hear from people on such occasions, nothing remarkable — when she said:

"… See, that’s why Barack’s running: to end the war in Iraq responsibly…"

Say what? The Obama position, I thought, was an end, without modifiers, to our involvement in Iraq. Not and end to the war, of course. Democrats to whom Obama’s Iraq position (my one beef with him) appeals just want the U.S. to leave, never mind what happens in Iraq (at least Obama wants to leave "carefully" and "responsibly"), even though they use the phrase, "end the war." (Some of them, if you can fathom it, actually imagine that there will only be violence while Americans are there — I suppose they would also answer "no" to the Zen question about the tree in the forest.)

Well, we have been ending the war, quite responsibly and honorably, under the leadership of Gen. Petraeus over the past year. But I thought Obama was against that. I thought he just wanted us to leave.

When did that change? Or did it not change, and his wife is laboring under a misconception?

* Continuity note: I wrote this last night a minute or two after she said it, but didn’t post until now because I couldn’t find a transcript to confirm that I’d heard the quote right. It was one of those things where you hear something, and don’t right it down, but over the next few minutes you think, "Wait a minute… what did she just say?"

Condi the Barbarian?

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Condi

This wasn’t quite what I was looking for as I sought artwork to go on the op-ed page Sunday, but it certainly caught my eye. Here’s the AP caption:

Ossetian protesters demonstrate outside NATO headquarters in Brussels, Tuesday Aug. 19, 2008. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her NATO counterparts are reviewing relations with Moscow and are expected to curtail high level meetings and military cooperation with Russia if it does not abandon crucial positions across Georgia. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)

So not only do the Russians have the advantage in tanks and missiles, they’ve also got somebody who’s real mean hand with PhotoShop.

Which reminds me — aren’t we way overdue for a Conan sequel? And don’t try to tell me Ah-nold’s got better things to do…

‘Are you going to the American side?’

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This was a fascinating, highly illuminating little anecdote in the WSJ today. I recommend reading the whole piece, but at least this part:

    Lia’s husband had remained behind and arrived in Tbilisi shortly before I did. "He was trying to keep the house and the fields," she explained. "Afterward, he wanted to leave, but he was circled by soldiers. It was impossible. He was in the orchards hiding from the Russians in case they lit the house. He was walking and met the Russian soldiers and he made up his mind that he couldn’t stay any more. The Russian soldiers called him and asked where he was going, if he was going to the American side."
    "The Russians said this to him?" I said.
    "My husband said he was going to see his family," she said. "And the Russians said again, ‘Are you going to the American side?’"
    "So the Russians view you as the American side, even though there are no Americans here."
    "Yes," she said. "Because our way is for democracy."

Sort of clarifies things, doesn’t it?

WOW but we’re self-absorbed

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The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in
Journalism sends out a weekly tracking report on news coverage of the presidential election, which I generally glance at. This week’s floored me:

    Last week, for the first time in nine months, another event generated more media attention than the presidential campaign. The conflict in Georgia filled 26% of the newshole from August 11-17 while campaign coverage registered at 21%, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
    The election generated its lowest level of coverage since December 2007….

"…for the first time in nine months!"

Folks, the presidential election IS very important. But that’s not ALL that’s important. Sheesh. I guess I should take some comfort from the fact that for one week at least, we acknowledged it.

If there’s no ‘or else,’ Putin will never change course

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Had to shake my head again this morning at the fecklessness of the West:

North Atlantic Treaty Organization ministers struggled against the
limits of their powers Tuesday at a meeting in Brussels. They called on
Russia to withdraw its troops from Georgia immediately, but stopped
short of saying what they would do to punish noncompliance.

If we don’t say what we’ll do "or else," Putin does what he pleases. He might anyway, but this way it’s cost-free for him.

A civilization that behaves this way, that can’t stand up to naked aggression against an underdog ally, deserves to decline. The tyrants running China, looking forward to their century, have to be loving this — first the Olympics, now this. Can life get any better?

Hit Russia with consequences NOW

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The first couple of days after Russia went into Georgia, everybody in the West said, How awful! And there’s nothing we can do!

Well, it’s awful, all right, but there’s plenty we can do, as writers across the political spectrum (from Charles Krauthammer to Trudy Rubin) started saying by the end of last week. These bullets come from Krauthammer:

1. Suspend the NATO-Russia Council established in 2002 to help bring Russia closer to the West. Make clear that dissolution will follow suspension…
2. Bar Russian entry to the World Trade Organization.
3. Dissolve the G-8….
4. Announce a U.S.-European boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi. To do otherwise would be obscene…

Ms. Rubin used softer language, such as "Under present conditions, it’s hard to imagine holding the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, not far from the Georgian war zone…" But made similar points. She added:

    Europe and America must support, and provide substantial aid to,
Saakashvili, and insist on the need for independent peacekeepers in
Georgia. European countries must finally fashion a joint energy policy
and lessen dependence on Moscow, rather than cutting separate deals
with Russia.

So we had, and have, options. But it hit me this morning that we need to go ahead and act on them, NOW, and not let up until Russian behavior changes dramatically — for the better, that is.

Why? Because the pattern has been clear in recent days: Russians invade. West gets upset. Russia says we’ll be done in a minute. West fumes. Russia says it’s done now. West starts talking (sort of) tough. Russia agrees to cease-fire. West says that’s better. Russia says it’s withdrawing. West says, you’re not withdrawing, either. Russia says we’re ABOUT to withdraw and moves closer to Tbilisi. West says why aren’t you withdrawing? Russia says NOW we’re withdrawing, and blows up a Georgian airfield….

The consequences, to the extent that the West can get them together, need to start NOW. Then Russia is in the position of waiting for US to do something that is completely up to us — lift the consequences — instead of the other way around. Because folks, this current arrangement is not good.

We will kill Harkonnens together

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James Smith is a very nice guy, and he’s also a Democrat in the post-Vietnam era. These undeniable facts lead to a sense of dissonance sometimes when he talks like a soldier. I’ve noticed this several times in the couple of years since he joined the infantry.

I noticed it again yesterday during his address to Rotary. Now that I’m writing about it, I forget exactly who said the words that kicked off this train of thought, although I remember the context. Maybe James said it, or maybe it was said by one of his comrades during a video clip he showed us. No matter. It was part of his presentation, and I know I have heard James say the same thing at other times.

Anyway, the context had to do with fighting alongside Afghan allies. These are a people bred to unbelievably (by Western standards) harsh deprivation ever since Alexander the Great was there. The dry, stark landscape is practically lunar, and the person you speak with today could get his head cut off and his body left in the dust of the road (there is only one paved road running through the entire province, and you stay off of it because a beaten path invites IEDs) as a warning, just because he spoke to you.

James speaks warmly of the bonds between his men and the Afghan police they work with. He repeatedly says any one of them would have taken a bullet for him. At one point in the presentation, either James or the guy on video, speaking of those allies, mentioned this thing that binds them: They "kill Taliban" together.

Normally, James speaks of the bond in terms that wouldn’t make delicate civilians — especially peace-minded fellow Democrats — wince, such as mutual self-sacrifice (that willingness to take a bullet) or the way the children of the country inspire him to believe in its future. But one gets the impression that among soldiers (and national police), the "kill Taliban together" thing is either said often, or is so understood that it doesn’t have to be said.

When it came up Monday, I immediately thought of Dune. Similar landscape, and the bond that the Atreides sought with the Fremen (too late to save the Atreides, unfortunately) was so very much like this one. There is the passage in which a small band of surviving Atreides form an ad hoc alliance with some Fremen, and the key affirmation that they are now allies goes like this:

    "We will kill Harkonnens," the Fremen said. He grinned.

A Rotary meeting is about as far as you can get from the surface of Arrakis. But I get the impression that Afghanistan is not.

Capt. Smith speaks to Rotary

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Capt. (Rep.) James Smith spoke to the Columbia Rotary Club about his experiences in Afghanistan. Some highlights:

  • Before the speech, the club recognized my colleague Chuck Crumbo for the job he did reporting, in country, on the exploits of the 218th Brigade. Chuck accepted the well-deserved honor with typical modesty.
  • Capt. Smith told the story again of how he, at age 37, bucked the system by insisting that he be allowed to quit the JAG Corps and join the infantry — after being inspired by a visit to Ground Zero in NYC. The system bucked back, and in fact finally told him that he would have to resign his commission and start over as an enlisted man in basic training, keeping up with the 18-year-olds. Obviously, they expected him to say, "Never Mind." But he accepted the challenge, went through basic, worked his way back up to captain, and ended up leading a team that fought the Taliban alongside Afghan national police forces. (The poor-quality video below, from my phone, is the part when he was telling the story of going to Basic again.)
  • Yes, he did say the phrase, "If I run for governor." Interestingly, the subject was brought up by arch-Republican Rusty DePass. Rusty’s son served with Capt. Smith in Afghanistan, and he has warned his Dad that if the captain runs, he’s going to support him.
  • Also in the audience was Joe Wilson, and this provided another example of how military service bridges partisan gaps. (It’s a pet theory of mine that the partisan bitterness of this generation results from politics now being dominated by the post-draft — and especially post WWII — generation, and they lack that shared experience to teach them that we’re all Americans first, not Democrats or Republicans.) Anyway, Rep. Smith made a point of mentioning that Joe was his C.O. back in his JAG days.
  • As in his e-mailed reports you read on this blog, James exhibited his characteristic optimism about the future of Afghanistan, based on his experience with the children of the country. Whenever they’d roll into a village, he’d send his second-in-command to talk to the village elder, then go question a 10- or 11-year-old himself. The elder, trying to walk a tightrope between the Coalition and the Taliban, would blow smoke, such as "We last saw about a dozen Taliban a couple of weeks ago." The kid would give the straight intel, along the lines of "There were two dozen, and they rolled out of here the moment they saw you coming, just minutes ago."

It was a compelling presentation (particularly the part about how his team tracked down a Taliban leader who had been terrorizing the region), and I wish I’d had the resources at hand to have gotten the whole thing on video — good-quality video. Sorry about the lousy quality of this below…

   

How much 55 mph could save us

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Ran into Samuel this morning and he gave me a break — he didn’t ask me if I had read the book yet. But he did, of course, get onto 55 mph, and he started throwing a bunch of numbers at me, and I meant to ask him to e-mail his numbers to me, but forgot, but that’s OK because when I got to the office I found that he had already sent me the numbers, over the weekend. To wit:

If we had a 55mph which Chevron says we save 22 Billion Gallons of Gas which is 524 million barrels of oil on an annual basis, here is what you get  a drop in the price of oil of at least $ 15 to $20 dollars a barrel, the dollar’s value improves and the price fall further and then the speculators see that this is not there ballgame anymore  and it falls further and so the thugocracies start seeing their boondoggles shrink and Putin , Ahmadinajad and others find out they are no longer awash in petrodollars and remember Europe is facing a slow down now and even in China  it is slowing down so now we need to go for efficiency and energy security so we can make the jump to other fuels for transportation. Now the other big factor here is inflation and if we did this we would hit it with a big bat  and slow it down significantly which then brings all  things down. Now we  cannot let out domestic retail price slip below $ 2.50 a gallon so we  need to set a floor that if the prices dips , it is taxed to fund alternative fuels , low-carbon , non-carbon, wind , solar. There are answers , but not from Washington. Are you the one ? Will you lead ? Are you related to Thomas Paine ,Thomas Jefferson, & Abigal Adams It is time for the ONES to emerge. We need new Founding Leadership.This country needs action ! Are you the ONE ?????????

As Samuel said to me this morning, "That’s the word, ‘Thugocracy.’" And he’s right. Why does Putin think he can get away with this stuff in Georgia? Because he can. And why can he? Because of the oil and gas.

Anyway, before he got away, I got Samuel to agree with me that we should do 55 AND drill, thereby reasserting the essential Energy Party organizing principle: Do Everything. Only then can we make the thugs feel it.

Note that at the end of his missive Samuel was expressing his frustration at the lack of leadership. Amen to that. He says he’s about had it with all of ’em — Democrats as well as Republicans. Of course, I’ve been there for some time.

Today’s editorial about Georgia

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With Mike gone, I’ve taken up the task of occasionally writing editorials on national and international issues (I say "occasionally" because our editorial emphasis remains as always on South Carolina). So it is that I offer for your discussion the one I wrote for today about Russian aggression in Georgia. Here’s the link, and here’s an excerpt…

… Aw, it was all so good that I couldn’t pick an excerpt. Here’s the whole thing:

Russian aggression
turns U.S. focus
to true global stakes

THERE IS A STRAIN of naive isolationism that has been woven tightly into the American character since the birth of the nation. Insulated by oceans from Europe and Asia, occupied with our own pursuits of happiness, we have through most of our history wished the rest of the world would just take care of itself.

This has been true on the political right as well as on the left. George W. Bush promised as a candidate not to engage in “nation-building” (and his frequent bungling of that task post-9/11 might be seen as a backhanded way of keeping that promise), while Democrats still repeat the post-Cold War mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid!” We prefer to view the rest of the world in simple terms, from the rare need to respond to naked aggression (think the 1991 Gulf War, World War II) to the occasional opportunity to show charity (think the Somalia relief effort, before that day in Mogadishu), or as spectacle (the Olympics).

But the world is more complicated than that, and demands our full attention, and our complete engagement on all fronts — economic, military, humanitarian, cultural and diplomatic. The world was more interconnected than George Washington wanted to face even in his day (as we quickly learned from the Quasi-War with France, and the War of 1812). And since 1945, the United States has been not only the world’s mightiest power, but its most interconnected — whether we want it to be or not.

Last week, a Russia still dominated by an ex-KGB man yanked us back to that mode. Russia’s swift and remorseless move to crush a U.S. ally that had tried to assert control over two disaffected provinces was a direct challenge to U.S. complacency, and a stark warning to other former Soviet republics and satellite states that they had better reconsider their steady drift toward the West, or else.

A resurgent, oil-rich Russia has for some time moved resentfully from emulation of the democratic West toward pursuit of its lost superpower status. Add to that China’s determination to go far beyond dominance in Olympic gold medals, toward an economic and military hegemony that is within the reach of its phenomenally dynamic economy and vast supply of human capital. Both countries have the potential, and apparently the will, to pose challenges to the United States and other liberal democracies that will make Iraq and Afghanistan seem like minor irritations.

America’s first response to the Georgia incursion was to realize just how little it was prepared to do about it. The second response was to send in U.S. troops to provide humanitarian aid, an assertion of soft power that nevertheless drew a line in the sand, evoking the Berlin Airlift.

But this is not the Cold War. This is not Czechoslovakia in 1968, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asserted. Nor was it either of the other U.S. presidential election years in which Russia used force against its neighbors, in Hungary in 1956 or Afghanistan in 1980. (Today, for instance, oil wealth and control of natural gas supplies are the new “nuclear deterrent.”)

But in this election year, what is at stake goes so far beyond our internal obsessions about celebrity or even such serious domestic concerns as health care. And yes, it goes far beyond Iraq. And it will go beyond Georgia. The selection of the next president of the United States should be about who will lead us more wisely through the global challenges we have not even yet foreseen.

Sen. McCain, Sen. Obama — we’re listening.

Provocative thoughts about Iraq

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Fallujah

Now that the Surge has been indisputably successful, and the debate is mostly about what one does with that success going forward, it’s possible to have more intelligent and dispassionate discussions of what has happened, is happening and should happen in Iraq.

Here are two examples that were side-by-side on the WSJ‘s opinion pages this morning:

  • Francis Fukuyama’s "Iraq May Be Stable, But the War Was a Mistake," in which he tells of a $100 bet he lost. He had predicted in 2003 that at the end of five years, Iraq would be a mess of the sort that "you’ll know it when you see it." Of course he lost, and paid up. But he is not giving ground on whether we should have gone into Iraq to start with. He still says that much-larger-than-$100 gamble wasn’t worth it.
  • Jonathan Kay, in a book review of The Strongest Tribe by Bing West, describes how local U.S. commanders in Iraq understood from the start what it would take to succeed as we now have. But they were hampered by a SecDef who ironically had a little too much in common with the antiwar folks:

    Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary until November 2006, was focused from the get-go on bringing the troops home and insisted that "the U.S. military doesn’t do nation- building."

    It was only after Bush got rid of Rumsfeld and then decided to do what the likes of Petraeus and McCain advised did our success begin.

    Probably the most compelling part of the review is at the beginning, where a passage describing what it was like to be a gyrene in Fallujah in 2004 was quoted at length:

    "Imagine the scene. You are tired, sweaty, filthy. You’ve been at it day after day, with four hours’ sleep, running down hallways, kicking in doors, rushing in, sweeping the beam of the flashlight on your rifle into the far corners. . . . there’s a flash and the firing hammers your ears. You can’t hear a thing and it’s way too late to think. The jihadist rounds go high — the death blossom — and your M4 is suddenly steady. It has been bucking slightly as you jerked and squeezed through your 30 rounds, not even knowing you were shooting. Trained instinct. . . . ‘Out! Out!’ Your fire team leader is screaming in your face. . . . [He] already has a grenade in his hand, shaking it violently to get your attention. . . . He pulls the pin, plucks off the safety cap, and chucks it underhand into the smoky room."