War 2007-08 Archives

What's Arabic for "Willie Horton"?

The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), "the nation's largest association of Muslim organizations," joined by one of its increasingly natural allies, the left-wing blog ThinkProgress, is pressing John McCain to stop using the term "radical Islamic extremism" to describe terrorist and terror-sympathizing groups that are undeniably radical and extremist and justify that radical extremism with appeals to a radical and extreme reading of Islam.

Or, at least, a reading that I assume is radical and extreme; one would like to believe that groups like ISNA think so. Naturally, the United States wants and needs to convince the Muslim world that this is the case, and that the terrorists aren't right when they invoke Islam to justify violence against non-Muslims and even, very regularly, against fellow Muslims. But it's hard to make that argument if you don't even acknowledge the fact that the enemy is making such use of an ideology that purports to be grounded in Islamic theology. How would you have gone about combatting the KKK without describing them as a racist group, or international Communism without arguing against Communism? ISNA's leader apparently wants to shut down precisely that sort of dialogue:

Mr. Fareed, who is ISNA's secretary-general, said such usages are wrong.

"My own take on this is that we tried and failed to stylize this particular onslaught against the United States as one that has religious connotations and regional connotations," said Mr. Fareed, a former associate professor of Islamic studies at Wayne State University.

"I think this is just criminality, fair and square. We should just call them criminals. You want to call them terrorist criminals, fine," he said. "But adding the word 'Muslim' or 'Islamic' certainly doesn't help our cause as Americans. It's counterproductive. It paints an entire community of believers, 1.2 billion in total, in a very negative way. And certainly that's not something that we want to do."

The self-proclaimed sophisticates at ThinkProgress echo this line of reasoning:

The term "Islamic extremism" is ...sloppy, denigrating Islam as a violent religion while conflating the diverse, multifaceted threats coming from abroad.

The answer here is obvious: we should stop referring to groups like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah (literally, "the party of Allah") and Hamas as Islamic when they themselves stop doing so. But as long as they cite chapter and verse of the Qu'ran, it is simply the truth to say that they are who they claim to be. And it's heartening to hear McCain spokesman Steve Schmidt stick to his guns:

"Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda represent a perverted strain of Islam at odds with the great many peaceful Muslims who practice their great faith peacefully," Mr. Schmidt said. "But the reality is, the hateful ideology which underpins bin Ladenism is properly described as radical Islamic extremism. Senator McCain refers to it that way because that is what it is."

Meanwhile, as the Washington Times notes, McCain's Democratic opponents are not so hot to wield the truth:

Mr. McCain often uses the term "Islamic" to describe terrorist enemies. The two remaining Democrats in the presidential field, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, generally shun such word usage.

Contrast the fire directed at McCain just for speaking the truth with Sen. Obama's, er, admirers among - you guessed it - radical Islamist extremists. First up, a senior official of Hamas:

We don't mind - actually we like Mr. Obama. We hope he will (win) the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, great man with great principle, and he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community but not with domination and arrogance.

Then we have the Iranians:

Iranians are following the American presidential race more avidly than ever before. That's partly because they're eager for the exit of President Bush, who branded Iran part of an "Axis of Evil" and implicitly raised the possibility of a military strike against the country over its alleged nuclear weapons program. But the Iranians' interest is also driven by a sense among many Iranians that the candidacy of Barack Obama offers real hope for repairing the U.S.-Iranian relationship. Commenting on the Iranian preference for a Democrat in the White House, Sergei Barseghian, a columnist for the reformist Etemad Meli newspaper noted that in Farsi, the words Oo ba ma would translate as "He's with us." ...

...it's Obama's declared willingness to engage in "aggressive personal diplomacy" with the Iranian leadership that has generated the most interest among senior officials in Tehran, since this would mark a sea-change in Washington's approach. "Obama is a man of engagement, a man of negotiations," one Iranian official told TIME. ...

(More here on Obama's collection of admirers who are not such big fans of the United States of America). Even weighing the usual caveats here about the difficulty of getting information out of the Iranian regime, as well as the layer of blather TIME pastes over these quotes, it should hardly surprise anyone that Obama is more popular with the enemy when he declines to follow McCain's lead in calling them by their true name.

Beldar sees a photo of President Bush at the NATO summit rather differently from the NY Times.

The Democrats have an Iraq problem. The war has, for some time, been broadly unpopular, and the Democrats have tended to just assume that this should translate into Democratic votes, as the Democrats have been publicly identified as the anti-war party. But reality has a way of intruding. One problem is that some of the people who are most dissatisfied with the war are those who think it hasn't been waged aggressively enough, and naturally that's the group most inclined to support John McCain, a vocal supporter of the war but also a vocal supporter of a larger troop presence in Iraq for some years now. Another problem is that being locked into a narrative of defeat runs them up against pesky reality in the form of the counterinsurgency "surge" strategy and the improvements it has made in the military and political situation in Iraq, even through inevitable challenges like the recent counterattack in Basra. A third is the poor historical track record of dovish candidates in the race for the White House. But the broader problem is simply that their candidates don't have any sort of defensible vision for how regional security and America's place in the world would be improved by a headlong retreat now.

The serious, adult solution to this is to try to lay out a vision of how America's willingness to accept defeat in Iraq would not be like the dolorous consequences of defeat in Vietnam, or other great-power defeats in history. The easy solution is just to lie about McCain's position. Guess which one they chose, especially the Obama campaign, which is committed to pretending that you can plan for the future based on everything since 2002 never happening, rather than dealing with the world as it now is? I can't possibly improve on Charles Krauthammer's explanation of how McCain's vision of a permanent base structure in Iraq has been turned into "100 years of war in Iraq":

Asked at a New Hampshire campaign stop about possibly staying in Iraq 50 years, John McCain interrupted -- "Make it a hundred" -- then offered a precise analogy to what he envisioned: "We've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea for 50 years or so." Lest anyone think he was talking about prolonged war-fighting rather than maintaining a presence in postwar Iraq, he explained: "That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed."

And lest anyone persist in thinking he was talking about war-fighting, he told his questioner: "It's fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintained a presence in a very volatile part of the world."

There is another analogy to the kind of benign and strategically advantageous "presence" McCain was suggesting for postwar Iraq: Kuwait. The U.S. (with allies) occupied Kuwait in 1991 and has remained there with a major military presence for 17 years. We debate dozens of foreign policy issues in this country. I've yet to hear any serious person of either party call for a pullout from Kuwait.

As Krauthammer notes, even Obama's own senior military adviser sounded the exact same tune in 2003:

The desirability of a similar presence in Iraq was obvious as long as five years ago to retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, one of Barack Obama's leading military advisers and his campaign co-chairman. During the first week of the Iraq War, McPeak (a war critic) suggested in an interview that "we'll be there a century, hopefully. If it works right." (Meaning, if we win.)

Why is that a hopeful outcome? Because maintaining a U.S. military presence in Iraq would provide regional stability, as well as cement a long-term allied relationship with the most important Arab country in the region.

As McPeak himself said about our long stay in Europe, Japan and Korea, "This is the way great powers operate."

Indeed, some of us have been arguing for years that long-term establishment of a U.S. military presence in a friendly Iraq would be one of the strategic benefits of the war. Read Krauthammer's entire column for examples of the Democrats' flagrant distortions of McCain's entirely clear explanation; some of the highlights:

-- "He (McCain) says that he is willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq" (Barack Obama, Feb. 19).

-- "We are bogged down in a war that John McCain now suggests might go on for another 100 years" (Obama, Feb. 26).

-- "He's (McCain) willing to keep this war going for 100 years" (Hillary Clinton, March 17).

+++

A Howard Dean fundraising letter charging McCain with seeking "an endless war in Iraq." And a Democratic National Committee press release in which Dean asserts: "McCain's strategy is a war without end. ... Elect John McCain and get 100 years in Iraq."

McCain's point, which he continues to make and on which he continues to press Obama for a clear response, is that even as Iraqis take more control over the security situation in their country, there will still be benefits to a U.S. presence in Iraq for precisely the same reasons as in places like German, Japan, Kuwait, and Korea. Obama seems to understand that he has gone far out on a limb, as when pressed he started babbling instead about having troops around just to do embassy security. But when the press isn't there to question him, don't bank on him dropping the "100 years of war in Iraq" line. It's just too tempting.

UPDATE: The Columbia Journalism Review, not exactly a known hotbed of right-wingery, concludes that "Obama is seriously misleading voters -- if not outright lying to them -- about exactly what McCain said." California Yankee has more, including FactCheck.org's characterization of Obama's attacks as a "serious distortion to the point of rank falsehood."

SECOND UPDATE: The Washington Post's FactChecker, which quotes Obama on Monday as saying "You know, John McCain wants to continue a war in Iraq perhaps as long as 100 years," runs the videotape of McCain and concludes that the Democrats "have twisted his words".

This story about Chuck Norris' cult following among U.S. troops in Iraq is pretty amusing, but he is apparently popular with the locals as well:

Norris' appeal is not restricted to U.S. troops either. At an Iraqi police graduation ceremony in Fallujah, graduates called out for their "Chuck Norris" to pose with them for photos.

"Truthfully, I didn't know who he was. I asked the Americans, and they said he was a great fighter, and that's why they named me after him. They showed me a video, and it's true, he's a great fighter" said police trainer Mohammed Rasheed.

With his handle-bar moustache, Rasheed has a vague resemblance to Norris.

Another police trainer said Chuck Norris was a role model for the police in Fallujah, which until 2007 was an al-Qaida stronghold and the scene of fierce battles with security forces.

"I've seen his videos, he's a hero. He saves the city, he protects women and children and he fights crime wherever it is. We should all be like Chuck Norris," Khaled Hussein said.

As Michael Kinsley once said, a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. Witness this totally unsurprising (except for the source) admission by one of Barack Obama's foreign policy advisers, responding to Walter Mondale's Hillary Clinton's now famous "3 a.m." ad asking which candidate you want answering the White House phone at 3 a.m. to deal with a national security crisis:

"[Hillary] Clinton hasn't had to answer the phone at three o'clock in the morning and yet she attacked Barack Obama for not being ready," Ms. Rice said. "They're both not ready to have that 3 a.m. phone call."

True enough. But then, they're not the only ones running for President, are they? (See, the silly mistakes you make when you get primary-season tunnel vision). Even the lefty bloggers can pick up on the obvious (this from a conference call with the Hillary camp):

Blogger Jane Hamsher gets on and asks whether the 3 a.m. ad is reinforcing a Republican message - "isn't McCain ultimately the winner in that tactic"?

Yeah, sorry Jane, I know it's terribly unfair for anyone to consider national security when they vote for the presidency. It's like Swift-boating! Rice's admission came as part of the Obama camp's effort to push back at Hillary on the grounds that she, like Obama, lacks John McCain's qualifications for the job:

"It's important to examine that claim and not just allow her to assert it, which I think has been going on for quite some time," Mr. Obama said. "What exactly is this foreign experience that she's claiming? I know she talks about visiting 80 countries. It is not clear, was she negotiating treaties or agreements, or was she handling crises during this period of time? My sense is the answer's no. I have not seen any evidence that she is better equipped to handle a crisis. If the only criteria is longevity in Washington, than she's certainly not going to compete with John McCain on that."

McCain, of course, has been on the Senate Armed Services Committee for 21 years - longer than Obama has been out of law school. And before that, a quarter century in the U.S. Navy.

Hillary feels the same way about the contrast between McCain and Obama:

"I think that since we now know Sen. (John) McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. . . it's imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold," . . .

"I believe that I've done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you'll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy," she said.

Calling McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee a good friend and a 'distinguished man with a great history of service to our country," Clinton said, "Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold. That is a critical criterion for the next Democratic nominee to deal with." . . .

She said she and McCain had traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan together as she repeated a line that surfaced from the campaign trail. She and McCain "bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign, Clinton said, while "Sen. Obama will bring a speech he gave in 2002," stating his opposition to the Iraq war as an Illinois state senator.

In Obama's case, he is lashing out now because he thinks he got thumped in Ohio and lost in Texas, leading to howls of despair at his party's lack of an exit strategy from the primaries and speculation about the party's descent into a spiral of self-destructive attacks, all because Hillary did a better job of whining to reporters than he did:

"There's no doubt that Senator Clinton went very negative over the last week," Obama said. He said the Clinton campaign's multiple attacks "had some impact" on the election results "particularly in the context where many of you in the press corps had been persuaded that you had been too hard on her and too soft on me."

"Complaining about the refs apparently worked a little bit this week," he said, equating members of the news media with referees in a sporting event.

"So hopefully in addition to my call to Lorne Michaels, hopefully now people feel like everything's evened out and we can start actually covering the campaign properly," he said.

Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the reference to Michaels, producer of the television comedy show "Saturday Night Live," was a joke.

Don't worry, Obama can't handle Lorne Michaels but he's quite sure he can handle Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadenijad.

The problem with trying to keep up with all the examples of Barack Obama's far-left leanings is that I get the material for 3 or 4 posts for every one that I get to write...well, it's a long way to November. The Obamafiles folder in my email will get cleaned out eventually, no need to blow it all in February.

Anyway, nothing says "Change" like reviving the Left's defense policy demands as of 1983: Nuclear Freeze, opposing "the weaponization of space," fetishization of arms control talks with the Soviets Russia. Next he will be talking about Grenada and Pershing missiles. Still, it is nice to see Obama pushing ideas that aren't from the 1970s, I guess... where's Zell Miller when you need him?

H/T. Note that the source of this video is from the Hillary camp. Not going quietly, eh? Pass the popcorn.

SECOND UPDATE: Moe Lane notes that Obama's proposed "global ban on the production of fissile material" would be the death knell of nuclear power, which would cripple current energy production in countries like France, Japan and South Korea and require them to return to carbon-based feuls for power. In Obama's defense, he probably doesn't understand the issue well enough to know that.

UPDATE: Since we are on the subject of Obama and missile defense, here's more of what he has said on the subject (below the fold):

25 years ago next month, President Reagan made this bold proposal to the nation:

What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?

I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century.

Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it's reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades of effort on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn't it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is.

Reagan's proposal was immediately derided by Ted Kennedy as "Star Wars"; ever since, liberal critics have been arguing that it was impossible for such a system to work, or at a minimum arguing that it was not worth developing the technology if it could not be shown that it was already a workable system before development and testing were commenced (pretty much the opposite of how your usual R&D works). Slate.com defense critic Fred Kaplan, for example, has mocked the missile defense system as "bunk" and a "fantasy," while Greenpeace contends that "Missile Defense Does Not Work." Of course, these arguments have often been stalking horses for a variety of other ideological concerns about restraining U.S. "bullying," tying us more closely to international treaties, or not "militarizing space" (as if the worst imaginable place for war is a vacuum containing no civilians). Much as in the debate over coercive interrogation techniques, liberal critics prefer to pretend that things they dislike can never, ever work, so they can avoid the debate over the kinds of tradeoffs involved in defending the nation.

This week's successful effort to shoot a malfunctioning satellite out of the sky showed the world quite vividly how far these technologies have come:

(Hat tip to Congressman Eric Cantor for the video).

I await the response from the critics:

*Pedro: kicking it clean.

*Barack Obama as the Mirror of Erised.

*Debra Burlingame on Bill Clinton's Puerto Rican terrorist pardons.

*Good roundup of what's expected from various shows with the writers' strike over.

*The morality of waterboarding. This probably deserves a longer post but I agree 100% with the point that you have to consider the morally correct thing first and let the law follow.

*The most badass U.S. presidents in history. Hilarious.

*Stephen Green on why Hillary's South Carolina strategy was actually the opposite of Rudy's mistake.

*A fitting assessment of Harry Reid.

They're just the good cop.

Glenn Reynolds understands how in this case, litigation really is war by other means.

Yup: that's Cuban Communist executioner Che Guevara hanging on the wall at an Obama campaign HQ in Texas. Apparently they were out of Himmler posters. Video here, with a hat tip to Allahpundit, who suggests some perspective.

John McCain, for one, is not taking any guff from Communists, dismissing criticism from Fidel Castro over McCain's comments about Cuban agents torturing American POWs in Vietnam:

"For me to respond to Fidel Castro, who has oppressed and repressed his people and who is one of the most brutal dictators on Earth, for me to dignify any comments he might make is certainly beneath me," he said at a press conference.

"It's a matter of record and you can ask several of the POWs who had direct contact with some, some thug that came to Hanoi with an underling assistant."

Meanwhile, Sen. Obama himself is reiterating his offer to meet with Hugo Chavez, the next-generation heir to the Che tradition of violent socialist thuggery:

*Bob Klapisch has a must-read (really!) article about how the Twins got backed into the Santana deal with the Mets instead of taking better packages from the Yankees and Red Sox (one is left with the impression that the Red Sox, possibly rationally, lost interest once the Yankees were out of the bidding - unlike the Yanks they don't have unlimited financial resources and have a fairly solid pitching staff at present). Via Pinto. On the one hand, the Twins' new GM Bill Smith clearly screwed up by turning down a deal involving Phil Hughes, Melky Cabrera and two additional prospects in December; on the other hand, the Yankees will probably regret turning down a last-minute chance to get Santana for just Ian Kennedy, Melky and one other prospect (and I say this as someone who thinks Melky has a good shot to be a real good player).

*Speaking of great reporting, Fred Barnes' account of how President Bush decided on the surge, based heavily on interviews with the president himself, is also a must-read for intelligent discussion of the subject.

*The five stages of voting in Republican primaries. Via Vodkapundit. Absolutely spot-on.

*The wages of Kelo: the Second Circuit this morning affirms the use of the eminent domain power for the munificent public purpose of bringing the Nets to Brooklyn.

*Stanley Kurtz on Waziristan past, and Waziristan present.

*This is an amazing story, if true.

*You will look long and hard for two savvier observers of presidential politics than Karl Rove and Patrick Ruffini, and their takes on the 08 scene are worth reading, especially Rove's point about exit polls and Patrick's point about the advantages of online fundraising (added advantage he doesn't mention: online donors don't show up demanding favors).

*The FBI interrogator who questioned Saddam after his capture confirms what we all knew: Saddam intended all along to retain the ability to ramp up WMD production as soon as he could, and he made a deliberate effort to appear to still have WMD capability:

Mr. Piro: "The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there."

Mr. Pelley: "And that was his intention?"

Mr. Piro: "Yes."

Mr. Pelley: "What weapons of mass destruction did he intend to pursue again once he had the opportunity?"

Mr. Piro: "He wanted to pursue all of WMD. So he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD program."

Mr. Pelley: "Chemical, biological, even nuclear."

Mr. Piro: "Yes."

*Great move by the Yankees snagging Morgan Ensberg. Ensberg has had his struggles lately and granted he will be less useful as a first baseman, but his combination of power and patience makes him a potentially very useful bat.

*Color me un-shocked that Clinton crony Strobe Talbott would be duped by Soviet agents.

*The real DB Cooper, unmasked? Nah, he would never have stolen paper currency just months after Nixon took us off the gold standard.

*Mark Steyn rightly takes McCain to task for his hostility to making money in the private sector. I think John Hinderaker has the better of the argument about preferring McCain to a novice politician like Romney on foreign affairs - unlike Steyn's example of Hillary, McCain is a longstanding, indeed life-long, foreign policy hawk who has no illusions about the likes of Putin (I believe he once said he looked in Putin's eyes and saw the lettters "KGB"). And Pejman properly takes McCain to task for misrepresenting Romney's position on timetables and the surge, which is a shame because there really is a fair contrast (see here and here) on the fact that McCain was a longstanding, vocal leader on Iraq strategy while Romney played the role of a cautious follower who always kept his options open to bail on victory in Iraq for the greater good of getting himself elected.

*Andrew Ferguson on Fred: brilliant. Ruffini's Fred postmortem is also worth reading.

*This video about Hillary's role on the Board of Directors of Wal-Mart will likely hurt her mostly in the primaries, and certainly doesn't scandalize me. But it's amusing and interesting on a few levels, not least the accent she was using back then. There's also a lesson about what drives journalists; biases are one thing, but when Brian Ross mentions that he covered this story 16 years ago, it's pretty clear that returning to it now is about Ross' career more than about Hillary.

Former Tory leader William Hague delivers a hilarious and pointed oration on the possibility that a presidency of the European Union would grow into a much more powerful position, relative to the elected national gove