Category Archives: War and Peace

The hunter, home from the hill

Waterboarding: Torture or not?

Judge Michael Mukasey seems uncertain on the point of whether "waterboarding" is torture. Others who have tried it seem a bit more decisive. (Both of the following links were brought to my attention by Samuel Tenenbaum, who in real life
thinks about lots of things besides his 55-mph proposal.)

Here’s a video of a guy undergoing the treatment. He gets through it OK — but remember, he knew the guys doing this to him were friendlies, and would eventually stop.

Here’s a written account from another who experienced it. An excerpt:

Waterboarding is slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration. Usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch. If it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia — meaning, the loss of all oxygen to the cells.
The lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threatened with its use again and again. Call it "Chinese water torture," "the barrel," or "the waterfall." It is all the same.

After reading that, and watching the video, I believe I’d agree with John McCain that this constitutes torture. (Of course, I would be loathe to argue the point in any case with the one presidential candidate who truly knows exactly what he’s talking about when it comes to torture.)

But here’s another question: If you were actually racing against the clock to prevent a terrorist attack that could kill hundreds or thousands, would you do it anyway? Or would you allow others to do it in your behalf? Or would you simply look the other way if they did?

I’ll tell you what got me thinking along those lines. It was the interview with Alan Dershowitz on the above-linked video. He didn’t seem to mind the use of the technique to stop terrorism, as long as there is "accountability." He would want the president of the United States to specifically permit it, in writing. That’s a lawyer for you. Strain at a gnat, miss the camel — or the beam, or whatever.

Personally, I wouldn’t want anybody I’d ever vote for to give permission for such a thing. Nor would I want him to give a nod and a wink, either. If some Jack Bauer-like subordinate did such a thing, without authorization, and did indeed save many lives doing so, I’d be inclined to thank him on behalf of a grateful nation, then prosecute him to the full extent of the law. Unlike Mr. Dershowitz, I think under the circumstances I could live with the inherent contradiction.

But that’s just off the top of my head.

Look out, Tehran, here we come! Not…

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Zogby has found that 52 percent of the electorate is OK with going ahead and escalating our confrontation with Iran:

A majority of likely voters – 52% – would support a U.S.
military strike to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, and 53%
believe it is likely that the U.S. will be involved in a military
strike against Iran before the next presidential election, a new Zogby
America telephone poll shows.

So it’s time to scramble the bombers, right?

Well, not really — unless you, like the anti-Iraq-war people, believe we should decide whether to fight or not based upon polls of a given moment. I am not of that persuasion. The initial popular support of the Iraq invasion did not validate it, nor did later popular disenchantment invalidate it.

Honoring fallen heroes

Times: Thin Red Line extends into Iran

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Just in case you thought that a) the Tommies were bowing out of the fight, or b) nobody in the Western alliance was doing anything but talking about Iran, Réalité EU‘s International Media Intelligence Analysis brings this report to our attention:

SAS Special Forces Ops in Iran
Britain ‘s Sunday Times reports that British SAS and American
and Australian Special Forces have been engaged in operations inside the Iranian
border to interdict weapons shipments. There have been at least half a dozen
intense firefights between the SAS and arms smugglers, a mixture of Iranians and
Shi’ite militiamen. The unreported fighting straddles the border between Iran
and Iraq and has also involved the Iranian military firing mortars into Iraq .
UK commanders are concerned that Iran is using a militia ceasefire to step up
arms supplies in preparation for an offensive against their base at Basra
airport. An SAS squadron is carrying out operations along the Iranian border in
Maysan and Basra provinces with other special forces, the Australian SAS and
American special-operations troops. They are patrolling the border, ambushing
arms smugglers bringing in surface-to-air missiles and components for roadside
bombs. “Last month, they were involved in six significant contacts, which killed
17 smugglers and recovered weapons, explosives and missiles,” a source said. It
was not clear if any of the dead were Iranian.

You’ll notice that our boys are involved too — but that’s on the Q.T.

Up where that ol’ demon lives

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A reader, apparently doubting the Energy Party axiom that sharply increasing the price of gasoline via a tax increase would lower consumption, defund our enemies, clean our air, prevent catastrophic climate change and help the Cubs win the World Series, raised this point on my last post:

Hasn’t the price of gas gone up about $1 over the past 2-3 years?
People were saying in 2005 that a $1 increase in the gas tax would
reduce consumption. Did it?

Posted by: Gary | Oct 9, 2007 1:39:59 PM

Yes, it did (go up a dollar) and no it didn’t (depress demand). But I believe that’s because the price was so low to start with — near historic lows, adjusted for inflation.

I’m sort of reminded of one of my favorite books and movies, "The Right Stuff." The filmmakers had the brilliant stroke of having Levon Helm narrate the film, enabling him to say such things as (and you have to hear it in that gravelly Arkansas accent):

There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged
him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would
buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1
on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air
could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through
which they said no man could ever pass. They called it the sound
barrier.

Well, as it turned out that, to paraphrase Sam Shepard as Yeager, the damned thing didn’t even exist. At least, it didn’t exist in the sense of being something that would rip your ears off if you tried to go through it. So test pilots kept pushing the limit back. When Scott Crossfield actually passed Mach 2, Jack Ridley (also portrayed by Levon Helm), assures Yeager et al. that there are still frontiers to be challenged:

The real test wasn’t Mach 2. That demon lives at about 2.3 on your machmeter.

So it is that I find myself saying that ol’ demon that’ll kill the SUV wasn’t really to be found at $3 a gallon. That demon lives more at about $4 or $5 on your gas pump.

Kidding aside, I think an immediate, all-at-once increase of a dollar or even two — something that can only be achieved with a tax increase — would have a shock effect that gradual increase would not. The debate leading up to such an increase would be filled with such emotion, such doomsday moaning and crying, that when it actually happened, it would have a tremendous psychological effect.

Admittedly, that effect might wear off if that was then the permanent price, as others have suggested and I have endorsed. But even if consumption crept back up, less of the money would be going to the petrodictators, and more would be going into paying for research for ways to become independent of those sources for good.

Mercury

Heroes vs. victims

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A member of my Rotary club brought this Robert Kaplan piece in the WSJ to my attention:

I’m weary of seeing news stories about wounded soldiers and assertions of "support" for the troops mixed with suggestions of the futility of our military efforts in Iraq. Why aren’t there more accounts of what the troops actually do? How about narrations of individual battles and skirmishes, of their ever-evolving interactions with Iraqi troops and locals in Baghdad and Anbar province, and of increasingly resourceful "patterning" of terrorist networks that goes on daily in tactical operations centers?

The sad and often unspoken truth of the matter is this: Americans have been conditioned less to understand Iraq’s complex military reality than to feel sorry for those who are part of it.

I wrote back that I agreed completely. That’s why I wrote essentially the same column back in 2005.

Joe Biden on having the juice to get thing done

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Biden_001
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Why should voters in South Carolina’s Democratic primary skip the front-runners to pick Joe Biden as their nominee for president?
Because, he explained to our editorial board last week, he’s the guy with the juice. He’s got the experience to have the knowledge, he has sound ideas based on that knowledge, and he’s got the credibility to sell the ideas.
Today, he says, there’s no juice in the White House.
Take the immigration issue. Why, we asked, did the recent comprehensive bill fail?
“Bush,” said Sen. Biden.
“That’s not a criticism,” he added.
“I think Bush was more right on immigration than he’s been on any other national issue. But he had no Biden_019
credibility. He could not carry any of his base.”
He said it was a failure of presidential leadership. “You’ve got the lamest lame-duck president in modern history now. And it is actually a shame. No fooling. Because the few things where you could generate a consensus with him, he’s not of any help.”
So who has the juice? Joe Biden does, as he had demonstrated a few days earlier.
The previous week, he had pulled off the apparent miracle of getting 75 members of the U.S. Senate — which meant getting a bunch of Republican votes — to vote for the centerpiece of the Biden platform: A plan to divide Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions under a loose federalist system.
After all those pointless votes about timetables and such that other Democrats kept pushing, in full knowledge that they would not find their way into law, all of a sudden a consensus approach had emerged.
How did that happen?
First, “I don’t think there are 12 Republicans that support this president’s position,” which can be summed up in two sentences: “Stand up an Iraqi army so American troops can stand down. Two, strong central democratic government in Baghdad that will act as the first domino to fall through the middle east, generating the end — if not the end, a fatal blow — to terror.”
Under that approach, the purpose of the surge was “to give the warring factions breathing room… to make a political accommodation.”
Biden_007
But there’s no such accommodation. Sen. Biden says a lot of senators have been over to Iraq and talked to real people. And what have they learned?
“Nobody — nobody, nobody, nobody — thinks there’s a possibility of establishing a strong unity government that can gain the support of the Iraqi people and bring security and economic prosperity to Iraqis. Nobody.
“Every success that exists in Iraq has been at the local level. That’s where the successes come.”
The only ways the surge has worked, he maintains, is where it has enabled local, homogenous authorities to run things their way, without interference from Baghdad.
Last year, only 1,000 Sunnis stepped forward in Anbar province to join the national police force run by the Shi’a-led government in Baghdad. “The national police force is corrupt,” says Sen. Biden. “It is zero; it’s worse that zero. They’re death squads.”
“Eliminate it.”
The surge worked when Americans “said to the tribal leaders, look guys, you can patrol your own streets. You mean we don’t have to have the central government here? Absolutely. Good.” So “10,000 people show up from the tribes…. They’re patrolling the streets. They still haven’t gotten it under control. But it’s a lot further down the road, and no one’s talking about a national police force.”
Look at Kurdistan, he says, which has had local autonomy for some time. “And so everyplace you look to, it comes down to devolving power, where there’s any possibility of it working.”
How did he sell the Senate on this? First, “I’ve been working these guys and women for a year on it; I’m like a broken record on it.” He sold it on the merits, but it was also appealing because it didn’t involved the constitutional problem of trying to tell the commander in chief how many troops he can send where when.
But it also came down to juice, to credibility: “I think if you ask Lindsey or you ask other Republicans, they trust me; I don’t ever play a game with them. I think that they think I know something about this Biden_022
issue, and I have not been one who is saying things that they know is not rational.”
As opposed to certain other people seeking the Democratic nomination: “How can you say on stage, almost to a person, that I will not withdraw troops; I’ll have to have troops there, combat troops there for X amount of years, maybe to 2013, and by the way, I’m voting to cut off funding for those troops, yesterday?”
So unlike certain people named Clinton, Obama and Edwards, “I have some credibility with these guys that I’m not playing a political game with them.”
What about bringing troops home? “What I don’t want to do is fly under false colors here. I don’t want to tell the American people that if this plan is adopted, all Americans come home,” he said.
“If this plan were adopted, it’s the only way in which you could justify keeping American forces there.”
But if it weren’t adopted, unlike his rivals, he’d get the troops out right away.
“I would not withdraw from the region. But I’ll be damned if I’m gonna continue to have my son’s generation stuck in a position where they’re on the fault line, and the only thing they’re there to do is keep things from getting worse,” without any prospect of them getting better.
So that’s his deal: He’s the guy with the plan, and the juice to get it done. And last week, he had the cred to make folks believe it.

For video from this editorial board interview, click here.

Biden_031

Obama’s elevator small talk

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Based upon the umpteenth statement I’ve read along these lines, here’s my impression of Barack Obama making small talk on an elevator:

"Yes indeed, the weather is very fine today. Come to think of it, the air felt much like this on the day in 2002 when I voiced my highly principled, adamant opposition to the Iraq War. Let me tell you about it…"

‘Prudence’ or ‘timidity’? Chris Dodd thinks he can win, too

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Someone brought this Des Moines Register piece to my attention. It seems Joe Biden isn’t the only longshot on the Democratic side who thinks he can win.

Of course, Chris Dodd’s pinning his hopes on voters who look at prudence and see it as "timidity:"

Published October 2, 2007
Yepsen: 1st-tier Dems’ timidity on Iraq may create opening
David Yepsen
Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd is the longest of long-shot candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. But he doesn’t seem too agitated about that.
He’s an experienced politician. He knows how the caucus game often breaks late. Because of his 33 years of experience in Congress, he also knows something about U.S. foreign policy and the war in Iraq.
He does get agitated about that, particularly when the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination appear to be in no big hurry to get out. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all declined in last week’s debate to say they’d have U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of their first term – in 2013.
"I was stunned, literally stunned" to hear them say that, Dodd said in an interview for last weekend’s Iowa Press program on Iowa Public Television. "It was breathtaking to me that the so-called three leading candidates would not make that commitment. That’s six years from today."…

Time to get real in Iraq debate

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
NOW THAT we’ve put a fortnight and more between us and the Petraeus testimony, can we go ahead and have a realistic, honest, come-to-Jesus kind of discussion about Iraq?
I think we can. The “surge” has created that opportunity.
The idea behind Gen. David Petraeus’ strategy was this: Apply enough force in the right places, and you can create a secure space in which a political settlement can be achieved.
The promised measure of security has been achieved. Just as importantly, there is broader acceptance in this country that significant U.S. forces will be staying in Iraq for some time. The consistently implied threat that we might yank our troops out at any moment contributed greatly to insecurity in that nation — encouraging terrorists, and discouraging would-be allies from working with us against the terrorists.
For the moment, that threat is gone. If it wasn’t obvious before, it was certainly on display at a Democratic candidates’ debate at Dartmouth last week. The three candidates most likely to win their party’s presidential nomination moved beyond the fantasy that’s been offered too often to their base — that we could have the troops out of Iraq before George W. Bush leaves the White House. They acknowledged that in fact, we can’t even promise to be out by the time the next president’s first term is up in 2013.
That was a significant step. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards have walked a razor’s edge for some time, trying to say things that please the “pull ’em out now!” constituency, while at the same time leaving themselves room to be pragmatic and sensible later on, should they be so fortunate as to find themselves in a general election campaign.
This can sometimes lead to dissonance. For instance, in the debate, Barack Obama repeated confusing assertions he made in an op-ed column in The State, in which he first said “all of our combat brigades should be out of Iraq by the end of next year.” But his very next words were “We will then need to retain some forces to strike at al-Qaida in Iraq.” OK, if all of the combat units are out, what will we “strike at” them with? Boy Scouts? Or will the units used to “strike” be smaller than brigade strength? If so, how effective do we think they’ll be? Isn’t this a return to the “less is more,” minimalist force approach that led to the failures of the thoroughly discredited Donald Rumsfeld? If we’re going to free up “combat brigades” from other, nonspecified tasks, why don’t we send them after al-Qaida too?
But the magic number “2013” provides a measure of clarity. It says, We’re there. We’re going to be there. So what are we going to do now?
The question works both ways. Once Democrats accept that we can’t bug out, they can start getting real about what maintaining a commitment means. One answer was offered last week. The Senate majority took a break from futile, please-the-base gestures long enough to join in a bipartisan resolution supporting the idea of dividing Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions — a proposal long advocated by Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Sam Brownback.
But “What next?” applies with equal force to Republicans who backed the “surge” all along: Now that our soldiers have done their job, where’s the political settlement in Baghdad?
Sen. Lindsey Graham surprised some last week when he told TIME magazine that he’s willing to give the Maliki government until Christmas to get its act together, and not much more than that.
What? Is one of the biggest fans of the surge, as “never say die” as anyone, ready to throw in the towel? No. But with the U.S. military having done, and continuing to do, its job, no one can make excuses for an Iraqi government that doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity thus provided.
“The challenges and the problem areas in Iraq are not lost on me as a big fan of the surge,” he told me over the phone Friday. “I’m trying to let people know that when you say the political is not moving at the appropriate pace, I agree with you, and I acknowledge” it.
“I want people to acknowledge the security gains, because they’re real, and quit trying to minimalize them. That’s just not fair.” Nor would it be fair or reasonable, he suggested, for him or anybody else to make excuses for political stalemate.
“I would be the first to say, 90 days from now, if they haven’t delivered anything… regarding the major political reconciliation benchmarks, that it would be clear to me they’ve gone from just being dysfunctional to a failure,” Sen. Graham said.
At that point, “We need to look at a new model: Is it wise to give more money to the same people when it’s clear they don’t know what they’re doing, or are incapable of performing?”
That does not, of course, mean pulling our troops out. It is the continued troop presence that gives us the options we have — and puts the onus on the Iraqi government.
For his part, Sen. Graham was not among the three-fourths of the Senate that endorsed Sen. Biden’s partition. To him, giving in to the idea that Sunni and Shi’a can never live together is as objectionable as endorsing Apartheid as a way of keeping the peace in South Africa.
Others disagree. But the wonderful thing is that we are now disagreeing about a way forward, rather than arguing about how quickly we can back out.
With progress like that, I can actually believe that a political solution can be achieved — in Iraq and, yes, even in Washington.

Graham sets Iraq deadline: 90 days

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This was just brought to my attention:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a pivotal Republican vote in the U.S. Senate on Iraq policy, is willing to give the government of Iraq until Christmas to get its act together.
But not much more.
Graham told TIME Wednesday that the Iraqi leaders have 90 days to start resolving their political differences with real legislative agreements or face a change in strategy by the U.S. "If they can’t do it in 90 days," he said, "it means the major players don’t want to." …

I’m going to see if I can get ahold of Lindsey for some elaboration…

‘Death to the filthy and accursed America’

McCain on the comeback trail

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B.J. Boling sent out a release to call attention to this piece by Dan Hoover. Here’s B.J.’s release, here’s a link to the story, and here’s an excerpt:

John McCain was midway through his "No Surrender" bus tour last Sunday when he entered territory both familiar and friendly, that of yet another military veterans’ group.
The tour was named for his position on Iraq, one mirroring that of the Bush White House: No withdrawal, at least not in any numbers and not now.
It also could have been named for his second Republican presidential run.
The Arizona senator is hanging in there, something many thought unlikely after six months of disastrously low fundraising for a major candidate by 2007 standards….
Now the leaves are beginning to turn, there’s a chill in the morning air, donations have improved, the private jet’s back on call, and, like Mark Twain, rumors of McCain’s political death proved premature.
His Iraq-centered performance in the recent New Hampshire Republican debate won favorable coverage.
He’s staking his final presidential run on being the candidate most vocally supportive of an unpopular war, a guy who wanted a troop surge before the administration thought of it.
McCain has used Gen. David Petraeus’ report on Iraq in a sort of "I told you so" context to reinvigorate his campaign, combining it with sharper criticism of the Bush administration’s initial policies. A reference to an America in dire need of leadership is the closest McCain comes to even hinting he’s running for president….

Now, talk amongst yourselves…

How does ‘The War’ measure up?

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Something occurred to me this morning. I was thinking about something I needed to get done, and thought I might try to get it done tonight, and then I thought, "No, you can’t: You have to watch ‘The War.’"

At that moment it struck me that I’m watching the program as much out of a sense of duty as fascination, and that surprised me.

"The Civil War" was riveting; I could hardly wait to see the next installment. The images, the words, the music all stuck in my head for a long time. All of that was so even though I have never been overly interested in that period of history.

Meanwhile, all of my life, I have been fascinated by the Second World War. I’ve never been able to get enough of films, books, what-have-you on the subject. I consider "Band of Brothers" to be the finest program ever made for television.

And indeed, I’m enjoying this program. But mostly, it’s a matter of going over familiar ground, just this time through yet another set of individual stories. It’s well done; it holds my attention. There’s no question that it is vastly superior to anything else I might watch on broadcast or cable television. (Of course, that’s not such a high standard in my view, since I consider about 99 percent of TV programming to be trash. I basically keep a TV set in order to watch DVDs.)

But after two installments, it doesn’t have the force as a cultural phenomenon that the series that made Ken Burns famous did. Maybe it’s because I learned a lot from The Civil War since, unlike so many of my fellow South Carolinians, I’ve never been one to obsess about it.

I don’t know. Thoughts?

You gotta keep ’em separated

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Just now I was listening to the latest Democratic debate and heard Biden talking about Iraq partition, and it reminded me — I’ve gotten exactly zero feedback from our lead editorial Sunday. It took a big new step in the direction of the Biden-Brownback plan, of which I had previously been leery.

Did anybody read it? Did you have any thoughts about it?

Unedited McCain footage

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Today, I was "on the bus," as Ken Kesey would put it, with John McCain, attending events in Aiken and Lexington, and riding with the senator on his "No Surrender Tour" bus in between.

I have a lot more material than I can go through today, but in order not to keep my readers waiting entirely, here’s some fairly representative footage from the Lexington event — formally, the "Veterans Appreciation Lunch and No Surrender Rally," at 11:45 a.m. at the American Legion Post 7, just off just off Harmon Street.

The theme for the tour, which ends tonight in Charleston, was the war in Iraq, with McCain presenting points he’s been stressing — well, forever, really, but particularly since the Petraeus testimony last week. His message was pitched as an advance of what’s likely to happen next in the Senate, with Democrats and the president resuming the monotony of putting up an amendment with a withdrawal date, having it knocked down, putting up another one, etc.

Turnout was good at both events. You can see the SRO crowd at this one; the one in Aiken was much the same.

That’s all for now.

Part of the Democratic base is in for a bitter disappointment

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Flash forward to January 2009, and what do you see? Here’s what I see — a profoundly disaffected portion of the Democratic base.

They’ll either be furious because the GOP will have won the White House for another four years, or furious because a Democrat won, and yet we still have troops in Iraq.

Now mind you, I’m basing this on my assumption that neither Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul nor Mike Gravel is president. Indulge me in this for a moment, if you will.

If you look at comments by responsible, grownup-type Democratic elected officials in response to the Petraeus testimony, you get respectful quibbling over matters of degree — maybe we should draw down a little more quickly, or some such.

It’s only among the unelected professional whack jobs out there whipping up the grass roots that you hear Let’s pull every last American in uniform out of Iraq yesterday!

This is a disconnect that could have serious repercussions, not only for the Democratic party, but for the country.

The problem is that Democratic elected officials, who know better, have thought they had to humor the more excitable antiwar folks up to now, and have never felt like they could say, Hold on, folks — what you’re asking for is completely unrealistic. Think what you want about the decision to go into Iraq — and I’m with you that that was a bad call — but now that we’re there we’re stuck with this problem on our hands for some time to come.

The only way to avoid the crash between reality and expectations that I predicted at the top of this post will be if some of the top Democrats start leveling more along those lines. If not, look for a real mess in 2009.

Six years on, adrift in a partisan sea

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
BACK IN the days of sailing ships, there arose a reassuring naval ritual: The captain would gather his midshipmen on the quarterdeck at the same time each day to “shoot the sun” with their sextants. The object was to establish the time — noon — and the ship’s location on the globe. It also fixed the positions of that captain and those aspiring officers in their societies and in history.
At noon on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the attacks on America, I tried shooting The Associated Press for a fix on where we are as a nation. Searching for “9/11,” I got 23 hits within the past 24 hours. Here are a few of them:

Right here in Columbia, S.C., “First responders and relatives of victims of the 2001 terror attacks were to gather” for a ceremony in which they would sign a steel beam traveling the country. It would “be used in the construction of a museum at the site of the World Trade Center.”
Security improvements at the Pentagon have left it “less the office building it was and more a fortress. A burgeoning police force has been given state-of-the-art capabilities to protect against a chemical, biological or radiological attack. Stricter access is being imposed, with fewer vehicles able to drive or park close to the building. Structural improvements allow the building to better withstand blast and fire.”
Three photographs showed the wares of Afghan carpet sellers in Kabul who sell crudely woven woolen images of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. The captions are wondrously vague, failing to make it clear whether the commemorations are sympathetic or celebratory: “An Afghan carpet seller chats with a friend, not seen, as a small hand-made carpet is seen on the ground featuring the attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center….”
“Felicia Dunn-Jones, who died just five months” after she inhaled part of “the toxic dust cloud that enveloped lower Manhattan,” was for the first time about to be mourned officially as the 2,750th victim of the attacks. The story goes into the acrimony surrounding the treatment of those who fell ill after that day.

There was also coverage of a commemorative march, a psychology feature on how survivors of the Freedom attacks have become more “decisive” in their daily lives, a story that speculated whether Rudy Giuliani’s mob-busting resume was as important as his 9/11 image to his political future (no, said one expert), and some baseball linescores that happened to contain the numbers “9” and “11.”
A group of midshipmen trying to reconcile these varied readings would have trouble finding their way. So as captain of this column, I decided to point my sextant at one point, and call it noon:

Under the rather oblique headline, “But Fear of Attack Persists,” I read that a new Washington Post-ABC News poll had found that “Six years after the Sept. 11 attacks, public opinion on terrorism is delicately balanced between confidence and caution.”

Some balance: “While 83 percent of Republicans say the U.S. campaign against terrorism is going well, only 37 percent of Democrats agree.”
Finally, a solid, accurate reading. I know exactly where I am — drifting in the American homefront doldrums, where the state of the world is a matter of partisan interpretation, a place where “Just one-quarter say the nation is ‘much’ safer than six years ago, 15 percent express a ‘great deal’ of confidence in the government’s ability to prevent attacks, and 8 percent say the fight against terrorism is going ‘very’ well. By contrast, two-thirds worry ‘a great deal’ or ‘somewhat’ about major terrorist attacks.”
I find I want to set all the canvas my masts and spars will bear, to sail this ship as far from this place as I can get, as quickly as it can go. And I’d like to take the rest of my country with me.
When I contemplate the schizophrenic responses of my fellow Americans even on something so basic and simple and existential as whether they think they are “safe” or not, I think almost any point in time would be better than this noon in this place.
For instance, I’d prefer to be in the United States of September 2001. At that time, with the shock of horrific events fresh, we were too wise to be partisan. We saw ourselves as having a shared destiny, which we did (and do). Then, the opportunities of the past six years had not yet been missed.
We still had the chance to take our NATO allies up on a joint fight against terror. The president of the United States had a golden opportunity to enlist us all in changing our lives to meet this challenge, particularly with regard to our dependence on foreign oil. Osama bin Laden had not yet slipped away from us at Tora Bora.
The various opportunities to secure Iraq quickly and early had not been blown. No one had stood before a “Mission Accomplished” banner. We had not heard of Abu Ghraib. The Golden Mosque was still intact.
Most of all, Americans of both political parties were united with us independents in wanting our country to succeed on the foreign battlefields where our troops fight real battles, ones in which life and death are not metaphors, and are immune to political interpretation.
Just above my search results I see a banner on The Associated Press Web site and I click on it:
“Gen. David Petraeus went before a deeply divided Congress on Monday, the commander of 165,000 troops heckled and attacked by anti-war critics before he began to speak. ‘Tell the truth, general,’ shouted protesters as the four-star general made his way into the crowded hearing room.”
My God. Check your sextants again, young gentlemen. How did we ever get this far off course?

Dem bumper stickers ain’t soundin’ so dumb now

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Just received this from the Chris Dodd campaign. No elaboration; this seems to be as deep as the senator chose to go:

STATEMENT OF SENATOR DODD
ON COMPROMISING ON IRAQ LEGISLATION

For Immediate Release
September 7, 2007

WASHINGTON — Today, Presidential Candidate Chris Dodd released the following statement on the proposed supplemental bill:
"Now is the time for Democrats to stand our ground, stick to our principles and fight for an end to this war. I know when to make a principled compromise and this ain’t one of those times."

You’ll remember Chris Dodd. He’s the principled "friend" of Joe Lieberman who was so willing to sell him out for the sake of something so stupid and useless as party loyalty.

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Dem bumper stickers ain’t soundin’ so dumb now