Sunnis Accept Compromise

This NY Times report seems like it should have been a bigger deal:

Iraqi political leaders broke weeks of deadlock on Thursday, with Sunni Arabs accepting a compromise offer to increase their representation on the Shiite-led parliamentary committee that is to draft a constitution.
The agreement was a significant step forward in Iraq’s political process, which has been mired in arguments between Shiite and Sunni Arabs over how many Sunnis to include on the committee. Still, it fell short of being final, as political leaders have not yet agreed which Sunnis would be chosen as members.
The offer – 15 additional seats and 10 adviser positions for Sunni Arabs – was first made last week, but was rejected by many Sunnis, who said they wanted more seats. Since then, Shiite committee members sweetened the offer, saying the committee would approve the new constitution by consensus and not by vote, making the precise number of seats held by each group less important.

Time to declare victory? Of course not. But seeing as how “we need Sunni participation” is the gripe du jour of the anti-war crowd, it’s encouraging to see another hurdle cleared.

How To Make People Not Care About Torture

Let’s say that you are an independent, or a mainstream Democrat, who has no particular stake in defending the Bush Administration. And let’s say that you believe that the actual incidence of murder, torture or other serious physical abuse of prisoners in US custody and the custody of US allies in the war on terror is unacceptably high, higher than should occur just from the natural fact that some prisoners in any prison population will be mistreated by guards or interrogators. (Jon Henke lays out a credible argument that this is, in fact, the case, even if a few of the examples he cites seem rather strained). And let’s say that you would actually like something to be done about this.
Shouldn’t you be incensed right now at Dick Durbin, Joe Biden, Amnesty International, Newsweek, and Time Magazine? Let’s recall briefly:
*Durbin compared US troops’ treatment of prisoners in their custody to the Nazis, the Soviets, or Pol Pot, a comparison predictably trumpeted by Al Jazeera.
*Biden called for the closing of Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay and the release of its occupants, although he did then render this assertion largely nonsensical by saying we should “keep those we have reason to keep.” Biden further complained about the indefinite nature of the detention of terrorists at Gitmo, to the hosannas of Daily Kos.
*Amnesty International called Gitmo the “gulag of our times”.
*Time Magazine ran a profile of the interrogation of an actual Al Qaeda hijacker wannabe – i.e., someone who wanted to kill me, and would very much like to have killed you too – complaining about a whole raft of “coercive” interrogation procedures, like that were justly mocked for their mildness, under the circumstances, by Lileks in this penetrating Screed.
*Newsweek, of course, started the whole movement to refocus attention away from mistreatment of prisoners to charges that American troops committed blasphemy by mishandling the Koran.
Several of these folks, Durbin in particular, also blamed everything on the U.S. not following the Geneva Conventions.
Let’s take a deep breath here. Look: conservative Republicans are in power right now in Washington, controlling the Executive Branch and holding partisan majorities in both Houses of Congress. And will continue to control the White House and Senate, and probably the House, for 3 1/2 more years, at least. You will get nothing accomplished without persuading them that it is (1) morally imperative, (2) in our national interest, and/or (3) in their political interest to do something about the treatment of prisoners in US custody in the War on Terror.
Republicans know that the majority of the public voted for Bush, knowing all about Abu Ghraib, and knowing all about all the other charges against the Iraq War. Republicans know full well that comparing American soldiers to Nazis is a political gaffe of enormous proportions, the kind of gift from your political opponents that you can’t turn down. (See Patrick Ruffini and Hugh Hewitt on why this whole conversation is poison for the Democrats). Conservative Republicans believe, and have very good reasons to think the majority of the American public believes, that the United States should decide for itself what is right and in its national interest, rather than being told what to do by a bunch of international agreements. And there are plenty of us who believe, as I do, that in a war of this nature, where the most dangerous weapons are the jihadis themselves, there’s nothing wrong with holding people who are out to get us until we are certain that there is no more danger – however long that takes. And then there’s this:

Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Whose gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.

See, Colonel Jessep was the bad guy in that movie. He did something that was indisputably bad, and the audience rightly cheers when he goes to prison. We don’t expect our military, no matter what their other virtues, to act like barbarians.
But don’t you think there are a lot of people out there who listen to this particular speech and say, “he has a point”? (In your heart of hearts, don’t you feel that way?) Don’t you think American troops deserve the benefit of every doubt? Isn’t it obviously the fact that the bulk of the American people don’t much care to complain about a little rough treatment for actual, bona fide terrorists who would slit the throat of a young child if they could? Isn’t it obviously the case that our troops are dealing with people who are not only trained to lie about mistreatment, but are lethally dangerous to their captors if treated like ordinary prisoners? And then we recall, as Bill Whittle discusses at length, that our adversaries in Afghanistan and Iraq and wherever else we capture them have committed war crimes not as isolated incidents but as a fish swims in the water; nearly everything they do, from fighting out of uniform, to faking surrenders, to targeting civilians, violates the most basic rules of warfare that have existed between combatants since many centuries before there was any such thing as “international law.” Read Whittle and be reminded that it would be, not merely unwise, but a moral atrocity to reward this type of conduct by treating these guys exactly the same as we treat enemies who abide by those rules.*
In short, if you are selling “the Iraq War is evil” and “Americans are acting like Nazis” and “it’s just like the gulag” and “boo hoo for actual sworn members of Al Qaeda who have to endure excessive heat and too much air conditioning (this, for guys who previously lived in caves) and have to listen to loud music” and “we ought to let these guys go free” and “we are acting illegally by not following some treaty” – well, you already know that the guys in power don’t buy that, and they didn’t get elected by buying it, and they don’t believe the public buys it, and they’re almost certainly right on that score.
So, you have two choices. One, you can just keep peddling inflammatory we-lefties-alone-have-the-moral-high-ground rhetoric and engaging in moral self-gratification, and keep pushing complaints about easily mocked hardhsips for vicious killers. This tactic is guaranteed to cause people in power to circle the wagons and tune you out and the public to lump you in with dope-addled peaceniks with no common sense, however much it may make you feel wonderful about yourself. Or – go back and read Henke again – you can keep a laser-like focus on the worst abuses, the actual deaths and genuine, indefensible instances of torture and mistreatment, and try to win over enough Republicans to force some changes.
There are plenty of us who are willing to be persuaded by arguments like Henke’s that leave out the overwrought and frankly anti-American comparisons to Communists and Nazis but that also zero in on genuine abuses rather than sob stories about how these guys were treated a little mean. But when you call American soldiers Nazis and call Guantanamo the gulag – as it sits just miles from actual gulags – you cheapen the meaning of “Nazi” and “gulag”. And when you call the interrogation methods that have been approved by the Pentagon “torture,” you cheapen the meaning of torture. And you end up devaluing your own words to the point where they flow over the listener like so much rainwater.
Plus, you wind up driving away people who might be tempted to listen to you. I tried to lay out my own thoughts back in February, and still I had people jumping down my throat for not denouncing the Bush Administration and all its works, to the point where I wound up frankly wondering if it’s worth the grief you get for writing about this subject. If you want to get things done, try not attacking people who try to meet you half way on these things.
Predictably, we see where the Democrats’ hearts lead them. They want to relive 1987, when they pilloried Reagan over Iran-Contra as their path to win back the White House. Of course, that didn’t work, but it felt good. As a number of commentators have pointed out, that debate would have gone much better for the Dems if they’d focused on what was genuinely bad – trading arms for hostages – but no, they wanted to settle scores with Reagan over his determination to battle Communism in Central America, a fight where Reagan had a lot more public support. Here we go again, with the Democrats trying to paint American efforts as evil and wrong in a big way, rather than flawed in a specific and correctible way, and framing an argument about whether we are being too hard on the evildoers. The more you hear “Nazi” and “gulag” and “Geneva” and complaints about sleep deprivation and rap music, the less will get done about guys getting raped or beaten to death in custody. That can’t be what the Left wants – can it?

Continue reading How To Make People Not Care About Torture

Yes, There Were Flowers

Hitchens:

The welcome that I’ve seen American and British forces get in parts of Iraq is something I . . . want to mention first because there are people who say that that never happened. It is commonly said by, umm, political philosophers like Maureen Dowd . . . where were the sweets and where were the flowers? Well, I saw it happen with my own eyes and no one’s going to tell me that I didn’t. I saw it . . . months after the invasion, people still lining the roads . . . Especially in the south – still lining the roads and waving and the children waving which is always the sign, because if the parents don’t want them to, they don’t. For miles, it . . . was like, this is the nearest I’ll get to taking part in the liberation of the country, to ride in with the liberating army. I’ll never forget, and I will not allow it not to be said that that did not happen. And in the marshes too – the marsh Arab area of the country which was drained and burned out and poisoned by Saddam Hussein. Again, almost hysterical welcome, and in Kurdistan in the north.

Via Instapundit

What Smash Said

It needs to be said now and then.
This is, of course, one reason why I’m so glad we still have Bush in office. I get the sense that, whatever else is going on, Bush still wakes up in the morning looking to take the fight to the bad guys. And, perversely, as his presidency eventually reaches lame-duck status, he’ll only be more single-minded on the objective, which is his legacy whether he chooses it or not.

The Constable Blundered

Go read Captain Ed’s thorough summary of the new report on the FBI’s failings leading up to September 11. Of course, it’s easy to find law enforcement errors with the benefit of hindsight; investigation’s a tough job. But the blow-by-blow both emphasizes why the Patriot Act was needed and underlines the damage done by fear of racial profiling.

Self-Parody Alert, Bias Edition

New York Times headline:

Anti-Muslim Bias Seen in Charges Against Man Linked to Al Qaeda


I swear I am not making this up. Who “saw” this “bias”?

After the arraignment, Anthony Ricco, one of Mr. Shah’s two lawyers, said the arrest was typical of the government’s efforts to cast suspicion on Muslims in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
He wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t a Muslim,” Mr. Ricco told reporters outside the courthouse.

Well, that part may or may not be true, but not in the way Mr. Ricco suggests, and certainly not in a way that would reflect favorably on Mr. Shah’s brand of Islam. Specifically, it is not a defense to this:

Prosecutors said the two men were recorded by a government informer swearing a formal loyalty oath to Al Qaeda. They were charged with one count of conspiracy to provide material support to Al Qaeda.
“Shah committed himself to the path of holy war, to the oath of secrecy, and to abide by the directives of Al Qaeda,” according to the criminal complaint filed by prosecutors. “Shah indicated that he understood the oath, and agreed that he would obey the guardians of the oath, namely, Sheikh Osama bin Laden.” Dr. Sabir pledged the same oath, the complaint said.
Among the secretly recorded conversations, the complaint said, were ones in which Mr. Shah said that he would like to learn about “chemical stuff” and “explosives and firearms,” and told an undercover F.B.I. agent posing as a recruiter for Al Qaeda that he had trained Muslim fighters. And at a meeting in April 2004, the complaint said, he smiled at a girl standing nearby and told the undercover agent, “I could be joking and smiling and then cutting their throats in the next second.”

Bias against people who swear loyalty to Al Qaeda . . . I can live with that. Where does this sinister bias lead?

The two cases have caused Muslims to tread carefully in academic settings, two young men said yesterday as they stood in the foyer of the Islamic Cultural Center on East 96th Street.
“In everything we do now we have to be cautious.” said Luqman Ellahi, 22, an engineering student who lives on Long Island.
The caution often deters honest debate. Nouman Khan, 27, a professor of Arabic at Nassau Community College, said that he feels “a pressure to not express political opinions, whether it’s the war on Iraq or the American Patriot Act.”

Well, caution in swearing fealty to the nation’s enemies is not necessarily a bad thing. But I do hope that a college professor would see that there is a difference between criticizing the Patriot Act and promising one’s services to Osama bin Laden.

Winning Is The Only Thing

In general, I agree with this Max Boot column on revisiting the roles of women and gays in the military. (via Instapundit). The only question, in both cases, should be whether the effectiveness of the military can be increased. Like Boot and a lot of other conservatives, my big concern in the 1990s was that people pushing social changes in the military were subordinating that objective to other goals.
Ultimately, of course, this is one issue that should be decided solely by the professional military leadership, without political interference from either side. But it couldn’t hurt to make sure that the military leadership has confidence that whatever decisions it makes won’t be second-guessed politically.

Those Pesky Connections

We just keep getting more pieces of the puzzle connecting Saddam’s regime to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups (via Instapundit), although as always, there are questions of how much we really know (see questions raised here by Smash). I, for one, am glad that the option of collaborating with a regime like Saddam’s is no longer open to Al Qaeda, and that we’re no longer subject to that uncertainty.
In another year or two, someone needs to do a revised version of Stephen Hayes’ book and really tie together what we do and don’t know about Saddam’s ties to Al Qeada, and which things we think we know but haven’t proven one way or another. Frankly, given the covert nature of these kinds of contacts, I’m amazed we know as much as we do. Not that we’re likely to get much help from the media, which regards this as a closed question.

We Don’t Need To Know

You know, while the pitcures taken of Saddam Hussein when he was captured were humiliating, that was a good thing – crack the mystique and all – and necessary to show we had him. But pictures of him in his underwear seem quite unnecessary, to say nothing of something we just don’t want to see on the front page of a newspaper.
(I’ll warn you before you click the link that the NY Post is now requiring registration. Ugh.)

The Saudi Insurgency

Christopher Hitchens (via Vodka), Megan McArdle and Tyler Cowen all ponder a New York Times article noting that the insurgency in Iraq isn’t following any of the traditional patterns for an insurgency, in the sense of (1) trying to build popular support or (2) having a comprehensible set of goals or demands. Hitchens – whose column is a must read – notes the obvious: the “insurgents” are basically Zarqawi’s organization and the former Ba’athists. Zarqawi’s group is part of Al Qaeda and composed of non-Iraqis; their behavior is precisely in line with Al Qaeda’s MO and stated ideology, and they are no more an Iraqi “insurgency” than Al Qaeda in the United States is an American insurgency:

The Bin Laden and Zarqawi organizations, and their co-thinkers in other countries, have gone to great pains to announce, on several occasions, that they will win because they love death, while their enemies are so soft and degenerate that they prefer life. Are we supposed to think that they were just boasting when they said this? Their actions demonstrate it every day, and there are burned-out school buses and clinics and hospitals to prove it, as well as mosques . . .
Then we might find a little space for the small question of democracy. . . . As for the Bin Ladenists, they have taken extraordinary pains to say, through the direct statements of Osama and of Zarqawi, that democracy is a vile heresy, a Greek fabrication, and a source of profanity. For the last several weeks, however, the Times has been opining every day that the latest hysterical murder campaign is a result of the time it has taken the newly elected Iraqi Assembly to come up with a representative government. The corollary of this mush-headed coverage must be that, if a more representative government were available in these terrible conditions (conditions supplied by the gangsters themselves), the homicide and sabotage would thereby decline. Is there a serious person in the known world who can be brought to believe such self-evident rubbish?
On many occasions, the jihadists in Iraq have been very specific as well as very general. When they murdered Sergio Vieira de Mello, the brilliant and brave U.N. representative assigned to Baghdad by Kofi Annan, the terrorists’ communique hailed the death of the man who had so criminally helped Christian East Timor to become independent of Muslim Indonesia. (This was also among the “reasons” given for the bombing of the bar in Bali.) I think I begin to sense the “frustration” of the “insurgents.” They keep telling us what they are like and what they want. But do we ever listen? Nah. For them, it must be like talking to the wall. Bennet even complains that it’s difficult for reporters to get close to the “insurgents”: He forgets that his own paper has published a conversation with one of them, in which the man praises the invasion of Kuwait, supports the cleansing of the Kurds, and says that “we cannot accept to live with infidels.”

This point is underlined by a recent Washington Post analysis pointing out the high proportion of young Saudi jihadists in the “insurgency”. These are reckless, frustrated young men, in their teens and early twenties, who desire martyrdom. Not only are they foreigners whose only interests are harming America and bringing death on themselves, but the fact that they have no plan or program for the future of Iraq is about as surprising as the idea that a 15-year-old boy who gets his girlfriend pregnant has no long term plan for fatherhood.
Then there’s the Ba’athists; Hitchens again:

[W]hy would the “secular” former Baathists join in such theocratic mayhem? Let me see if I can guess. Leaving aside the formation of another well-named group – the Fedayeen Saddam – to perform state-sponsored jihad before the intervention, how did the Baath Party actually rule? Yes, it’s coming back to me. By putting every Iraqi citizen in daily fear of his or her life, by random and capricious torture and murder, and by cynical divide-and-rule among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. Does this remind you of anything?
. . . Having once read in high school that violence is produced by underlying social conditions, the author of this appalling article refers in lenient terms to “the goal of ridding Iraq of an American presence, a goal that may find sympathy among Iraqis angry about poor electricity and water service and high unemployment.” Bet you hadn’t thought of that: The water and power are intermittent, so let’s go and blow up the generating stations and the oil pipelines. No job? Shoot up the people waiting to register for employment. To the insult of flattering the psychopaths, Bennet adds his condescension to the suffering of ordinary Iraqis, who are murdered every day while trying to keep essential services running. (Baathism, by the way, comes in very handy in crippling these, because the secret police of the old regime know how things operate, as well as where everybody lives. Or perhaps you think that the attacks are so “deadly” because the bombers get lucky seven days a week?)

I can understand why people objected, early in the insurgency, to calling the perpetrators of a guerilla campaign that then had some modicum of popular support “terrorism,” although the main motive for the objection was to deny any connection between Iraq and the larger war. At this point, however, it requires a fairly powerful desire to flee reality to keep treating these guys as anything but nihilistic, jihad-oriented terrorists.

Abu Ghraib In Focus

Rich Lowry and Christopher Hitchens (link via Roger Simon) offer up some perspective on the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse story. Lowry notes that the details of this New York Times story pretty well undermine the desperate efforts of Bush Administration critics to paint the abuses by the Abu Ghraib night shift as being done on orders from above; among other things, Graner and England admitted that they had been taking lewd pictures of themselves with others even before they got to the prison. Graner was an obvious bad apple, a guy whose first wife had three orders of protection out on him, and as I’ve noted before, only an arbitrator’s interference prevented Graner from being fired from his stateside job as a prison guard due to a serious history of disciplinary problems. Meanwhile, I hadn’t realized that England was a clerk who didn’t even work in that part of the prison and had been ordered not to go there. At this point, the only basis for concluding that what went on at Abu Ghraib was ordered from above is that some people want to believe it.
Hitchens, meanwhile, notes the bitter irony of Abu Ghraib being known solely as a house of American horrors:

To the Iraqis, it was a name to be mentioned in whispers, if at all, as “the house of the end.” It was a Dachau. Numberless people were consigned there and were never heard of again. Its execution shed worked overtime, as did its torturers, and we are still trying to discover how many Iraqis and Kurds died in its precincts.

If a handful of Americans had sexually and otherwise humiliated some Nazi prisoners at Auschwitz in 1946, would the name “Auschwitz” today be known solely as a place where Americans did bad things? In some circles, probably.

Peer into the Darkness

EUReferendum links to an article on the appalling rhetoric and mindset of leading advocates of political unification:

A senior European Commissioner marked VE Day yesterday by accusing Eurosceptics of risking a return to the Holocaust by clinging to “nationalistic pride”.
Margot Wallstrom, a Swede and the commissioner who must sell the draft constitution to voters, argued that politicians who resisted pooling national sovereignty risked a return to Nazi horrors of the 1930s and 1940s.
Mrs Wallstrom, vice-president of the commission for institutional relations and communications, was speaking in the former Jewish ghetto of Terezin in the Czech Republic.
She blamed the Second World War on “nationalistic pride and greed, and … international rivalry for wealth and power”. The EU had replaced such rivalry with an historic agreement to share national sovereignty.
Her fellow commissioners also issued a joint declaration, stating that EU citizens should pay tribute to the dead of the Second World War by voting Yes to the draft constitution for Europe.
The commissioners also gave the EU sole credit for ending the Cold War, making no mention of the role of Nato and the United States.

This sort of thing is, of course, yet more evidence that the “world government” crowd is more than a figment of the fevered imaginations of the American black-helicopter crowd. These people have actually convinced themselves – assuming they believe their own rhetoric – that demolishing national sovereignty is a workable plan for peace rather than what it really is, the removal of power from the sources of democratic accountability and the consent of the governed.

A Lot of Explaining To Do

Wesley Clark has an article in the Washington Monthly straining to explain away all the progress in the Middle East as having nothing to do with the Iraq war. Clark, still angling for that job in a Democratic administration someday, argues:

Anyone who has traveled regularly to the Middle East over the years, as I have, knows that the recent hopeful democratic moves in Lebanon, Egypt, and the Palestinian territories have causal roots that long predate our arrival in Iraq, or that are otherwise unconnected to the war.

Mm-hm. Anybody remember this guy talking about these “causal roots” when he was running for president? Sure, there are other causes. But that’s not the point; the point is that American policy removed one major obstacle to democratization (Saddam, who was part of the problem in multiple parts of the region), provided an object lesson in democracy by allowing it to flourish in Iraq (at least Clark doesn’t claim that Iraq was democratizing before the war), and – by isolating Arafat and announcing democratization as part of the way out in Palestine – strongly encouraged his successors to seek an alternative. And for whatever Egypt’s moves towards democracy are worth, it’s awful hard to look at two decades of intransignet Mubarak rule followed by a rapid about-face on elections the day after Condi Rice cancelled a trip to Egypt and not find a big American footprint. There’s a better argument that a movement in Lebanon might have developed anyway – but what made the Lebanese people think they could stand up to Syria without retribution, and made the Syrians think it wasn’t safe to crack down? American power may not have planted the seeds, but it certainly weeded the garden at a critical time.
Anyway, the funniest thing in the whole article, after all of Clark’s partisan spin and his efforts to deny credit to the Bush Administration, is his concluding sentence:

Let’s give credit where credit is due—and leave the political spin at the water’s edge.

D’Oh Canada

Austin Bay (link via Instapundit) thinks Canada is a failed state that could collapse and splinter . . . I understand why Bay thinks Quebec could and probably should secede from Canada, and while it may or may not be true that the current scandals engulfing the ruling Liberal Party could provide an impetus for Quebec’s separatists to gain power and demand secession, I don’t really follow the logic of why this would result in Anglophone Canada crumbling into bits as a result. It’s certainly true that the Canadian West is politically a poor fit with Ontario, but no moreso – and for many of the same reasons – than America’s red and blue states are at odds. Thus, even if we do finally see Quebec go its own way, there’s no reason why the rest of Canada shouldn’t remain intact.

Taylor Trouble

David Adesnik points to this WaPo op-ed arguing that the U.S. should press Nigeria to turn over former Liberian leader Charles Taylor to the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. While I’m a skeptic about international courts generally, the only issue here seems to be whether we should adhere to a prior agreement that removed Taylor from power, and at least this piece suggests strong evidence that Taylor hasn’t held up his end of the bargain. He should be reminded that deals we make with dictators are easily voided if they don’t comply.

That Big Meanie John Bolton

You would have to labor long and hard to come up with a crueler parody of the modern Democratic party than the opposition of Democrats to a male appointee to a serious national security position on the grounds that he is too hard on his subordinates or is a “bully”. (See here for a typical example of this rhetoric). Yet, somehow, that is where they have found themselves with John Bolton. Andrew Jackson must be rolling over in his grave.
Look, most people have worked for difficult or abusive bosses at some point in their careers; nobody likes them, and they can in many cases be counterproductive. But most of us also understand that the more serious the task and the higher the pressure, the more leeway you give a guy who gets results, and when you are talking about national security, the balance ought to tip decidedly towards getting the job done. This PTA-focus-grouped attack is all too reminiscent of the cringe-inducing line Dick Gephardt used over and over again during the 2004 primaries about how Bush “would get a mark on his report card: doesn’t play well with others.” Um, Dick, we’re not talking about kicking over a tower of blocks here.
And Democrats wonder why they lost men by 11 points in the last election. From the election results you can infer that women didn’t buy this either, of course, but I suspect that this sort of thing – placing politeness above effectiveness – has a particularly strong fingernails-on-the-blackboard effect on men.
(Of course, it’s not like Bolton groped the woman who’s complaining about him, or drove her off a bridge; that would be just plum dandy. For that matter, these same self-appointed anti-meanie brigades were strangely silent when Kerry and Dean were the Democratic front-runners. But John Kerry would never act badly towards subordinates, and Howard Dean would never yell at anyone).
For a twofer, Democrats have somehow allowed themselves to be publicly maneuvered, against what must be their better judgment, into the posture of defenders of the corrupt, hypocritical, anti-American, anti-Semitic United Nations. Win-win!

Putin, Up Close and Personal

There was a great article in the March 2005 issue of The Atlantic profiling Vladimir Putin (it’s available on the web only to subscribers but worth reading however you can get it). Paul Starobin, the author of the piece, makes the point that Putin doesn’t fit neatly into Western efforts to either embrace him as a democrat or denounce him as a dictator, and divides the profile in three parts: Putin the fighter, the Chekist (i.e., his KGB background), and the religious believer. On the first point, Starobin’s profile draws an obvious parallel to Theodore Roosevelt, as Putin was a weak, sickly kid who by force of will transformed himself into a judo champion. On the latter point, Starobin notes that Putin is apparently a devout follower of the Russian Orthodox church – a fact that, as with the religious Tony Blair, helps explain why Putin hit it off immediately with George W. Bush. (One amusing fact I didn’t know: down the hall from Putin’s Kremlin office is a private Orthodox chapel built by Boris Yeltsin in what used to be Josef Stalin’s living quarters. The irony is delicious).
Starobin also notes that Putin views the battle against Islamic terrorism as Russia’s to win, and of course that’s another reason why he’s seen as a key ally in the war on terror, for all the faults of his regime and the difficulties he’s given us in Iraq and Iran. The best allies in this fight are the ones who see themselves not as coming to U.S. aid but as themselves having a stake in the fight, like Israel, India, and Australia (one reason Blair has taken so much heat is because not enough people in Britain share his view that the fight is Britain’s).

Freedom of the Press, Russian-Style

Vladimir Putin doesn’t quite grasp the whole “freedom of the press” concept:

[W]hen Bush talked about the Kremlin’s crackdown on the media and explained that democracies require a free press, the Russian leader gave a rebuttal that left the President nonplussed. If the press was so free in the U.S., Putin asked, then why had those reporters at CBS lost their jobs? Bush was openmouthed. “Putin thought we’d fired Dan Rather,” says a senior Administration official. “It was like something out of 1984.”
. . . The odd episode reinforced the Administration’s view that Putin’s impressions of America are often based on urban myths fed to him by ill-informed aides. (At a past summit, according to Administration aides, Putin asked Bush whether it was true that chicken producers split their production into plants that serve the U.S. and lower-quality ones that process substandard chicken for Russia.) U.S. aides say that to help fight against this kind of misinformation, they are struggling to build relationships that go beyond Putin. “We need to go deeper into the well into other levels of government,” explains an aide.

Another example of why we need better and more aggressive public diplomacy. We can’t control what information gets to Putin, but it would be nice to create a climate where somebody in his circle would at least be aware of how ridiculous this sounds to Western ears (well, most of them).
via Rather Biased

Getting Results?

Cause?

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday abruptly called off a planned trip to several Middle Eastern countries that had been scheduled for next week, a decision that came apparently because of the arrest of a leading Egyptian opposition politician last month.


Effect?

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Saturday ordered a revision of the country’s election laws and said multiple candidates could run in the nation’s presidential elections, a scenario Mubarak hasn’t faced since taking power in 1981.


[snip]

“The election of a president will be through direct, secret balloting, giving the chance for political parties to run for the presidential elections and providing guarantees that allow more than one candidate for the people to choose among them with their own will,” Mubarak said in an address broadcast live on Egyptian television.
Mubarak – who has never faced an opponent since becoming president after the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat – said his initiative came “out of my full conviction of the need to consolidate efforts for more freedom and democracy.”

Is this real progress, in a country of 76 million people, three times the size of Iraq’s population and larger than the population of France? Wait and see.

Fake, and Inaccurate

Jon Henke catches Robert Scheer, the poor man’s Paul Krugman, fabricating 9/11 stories by claiming to know the contents of “secret” documents reviewed by the 9/11 Commission, in spite of the 9/11 Commission’s unambiguous statement that Scheer’s claims were supported by “no documentary evidence reviewed by the commission or testimony we have received to this point . . . ”
UPDATE: And speaking of fakes, maybe you’ve heard that homo sapiens and Neanderthals co-existed at one time. Bogus. (Hat tip: Jane Galt)

Battle Droids

The U.S. military is developing robot soldiers? This seems like it could have some real hazards to work out:

“They don’t get hungry,” said Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command. “They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”
The robot soldier is coming.
The Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in the U.S. military in less than a decade, hunting and killing enemies in combat. Robots are a crucial part of the Army’s effort to rebuild itself as a 21st-century fighting force, and a $127 billion project called Future Combat Systems is the biggest military contract in American history.

[snip]

The robot soldier has been a dream at the Pentagon for 30 years. And some involved in the work say it may take at least 30 more years to realize in full. Well before then, they say, the military will have to answer some tough questions if it intends to trust robots with the responsibility of distinguishing friend from foe, combatant from innocent bystander.
Even the strongest advocates of automatons say that war will always remain a human endeavor, marked by death and disaster. And supporters like Robert Finkelstein, president of Robotic Technology in Potomac, Md., are telling the Pentagon that it could take until 2035 to develop a robot that looks, thinks and fights like a soldier. The Pentagon’s “goal is there,” he said, “but the path is not totally clear.”

Of course, even aside from the issue of whether robots can be trusted not to target civilians, there’s a second issue: as Victor Davis Hanson has often argued, a significant part of America’s competitive advantage in combat is the brains and flexibility of soldiers from free societies, as opposed to those trained and conditioned in autocracies. Hopefully, a movement in the direction of automated soldiers won’t erode that.

“Low-Hanging Fruit”

Howard Dean, in a debate with Richard Pearle:

Dean also said the Bush administration has ignored the mounting threat in Iran and North Korea. “We picked the low hanging fruit in Iraq and did nothing” about the other, more dangerous regimes, he said.

So, now Dean’s complaint about the Iraq War is that it was . . . too easy?
Also, so much for Dean taking a role as a quiet functionary.

Meeting With The Enemy

It’s time for another episode of “let’s make an important distinction here.”
Matt Yglesias continues to argue that the Powerline guys are way, way out of line to say that Jimmy Carter is “on the other side,” contending that this “What’s being elided here is the all-important distinction between political disagreement and warfare.” Naturally, Atrios and Kevin Drum agree.
Powerline clarifies the charge here with a discussion of Carter’s meetings with the Soviet foreign minister, expanding on John Hinderaker’s original post containing the original attack on Carter. Jon Henke thinks Powerline goes too far, but nonetheless offers additional supporting examples, including an unnamed Clinton Cabinet member calling Carter a “treasonous prick” over his meetings with the North Korean leadership.
I’m mostly with Henke here – I don’t think Carter actually wants to bring about harm to the United States, but I do think that his activities since leaving office have gone well beyond what you could fairly characterize as just “political disagreement.” Carter may not be on the other side, but he has repeatedly and consistently shown up to offer his help to the other side in such a broad variety of international controversies that you can’t help but wonder what on earth the man does think he’s doing.
There’s a critical distinction here that the critics on the Left, most notably Yglesias – who’s posted on this three times now without addressing the distinction – need to grapple with. And that is this: giving speeches and the like here at home is, indeed, just “political disagreement.” It may help us or it may hurt us, but it is just speech. But that’s not what Hinderaker is talking about, although you’d never know from reading Yglesias. What he’s talking about is traveling around the world, meeting with foreign leaders and taking positions contrary to those of the United States or rendering assistance directly to hostile forces and regimes.
This is, of course, a recurring theme in conservative criticisms of a number of liberals – besides Carter’s many trips, prominent examples include John Kerry’s famous meeting with the North Vietnamese and the trip Kerry and Tom Harkin took to meet with Daniel Ortega in the 1980s. Jesse Jackson is also a master at this. To say nothing of Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark. (I can’t think offhand of conservative examples of the same; I’m sure you can find some, but the practice has been far more pervasive on the Left, and not only because we’ve had mostly Republican presidents since the dawn of the modern Left in 1968). Time and again, whether they be legislators, state officials, ex-leaders, or private citizens, we’ve seen the spectacle of people on the Left sitting down with hostile heads of state and assuring them that the United States does not present a united front against them. They, in turn, often use such meetings for propaganda purposes, including for the purpose of telling their own people that the United States is not going to help them.
This is just wrong; you may disagree with the Commander-in-Chief, but you don’t run around the world undermining him in front of our enemies. Other than Clark – who is very deeply on the other side and should have been prosecuted for treason for his visit to North Vietnam in 1971, saving us the spectacle of him offering legal aid to Saddam Hussein – Carter is the single worst offender on this score, and he does deserve a much greater degree of criticism for these persistent displays of what you can’t help but call disloyalty than the average “dissenter.”
Why does Carter do these things? He must understand, or at least believe, that he has some influence, some ability to alter the outcome of international controversies by actively intervening in them. When he does, he almost always takes a position that undermines or actively opposes the position taken by the duly elected chief executive of the United States. Does Yglesias care to explain why this practice is just “political disagreement”? Does anyone? If not, Yglesias shouldn’t be so quick to jump on the critics of a practice he himself considers indefensible.
If you can tolerate a few more of the sordid details of Carter’s transgressions against loyalty – not an exhaustive account, to be sure – try the Jay Nordlinger article here:

Continue reading Meeting With The Enemy

Us and Them

No time to blog this morning, I’ll just leave you with two links. First, Stuart Buck points us to this must-read Boston Globe article on interrogation tactics, from the perspective of the interrogators. The stuff on the areas of division, and of agreement, in the intelligence community was also instructive:

A retired general interrupted, “There is only one war. In Afghanistan, in Iraq. It’s all one war.”
“That’s wrong!” Scheuer said.
“You’re wrong, Michael,” the general replied.
“I’ve lived it for 22 years,” Scheuer said.
“I’ve lived it more than you have,” said the general.
It was a dispiriting spectacle. Three and a half years after Sept. 11 our spies cannot even agree on such fundamental issues as what kind of a war the United States is engaged in, what kind of threats its enemies pose, and whether those enemies are now or have ever been connected.
. . . [T]he only common ground available was the bankruptcy of the 9/11 Commission and the new intelligence act. Circling the wagons, everyone in the room seemed to concur that they had succeeded in preventing another attack in spite of and not because of political efforts to redress intelligence problems in the intervening years.
Scheuer contended that 9/11 commissioners and politicians were driven by the families of the dead to pass a hasty piece of legislation that will not make Americans safer. “With all due respect to the widows,” he said, “they don’t know jack about running intelligence.”
The other panelists hastened to agree.

Then there’s Mark Steyn’s latest, on why UN moral corruption is both inevitable and so pervasive the media barely notices it:

Now how about this? The Third Infantry Division are raping nine-year olds in Ramadi. Ready, set, go! That thundering sound outside your window isn’t the new IKEA sale, but the great herd of BBC/CNN/Independent/Guardian/New York Times/Le Monde/Sydney Morning Herald/Irish Times/Cork Examiner reporters stampeding to the Sunni Triangle. Whoa, hold up, lads, it’s only hypothetical.
But think about it: the merest glimpse of a freaky West Virginia tramp leading an Abu Ghraib inmate around with girlie knickers on his head was enough to prompt calls for Rumsfeld’s resignation, and for Ted Kennedy to charge that Saddam’s torture chambers were now open “under new management”, and for Robert Fisk to be driven into the kind of orgasmic frenzy unseen since his column on how much he enjoyed being beaten up by an Afghan mob: “Just look at the way US army reservist Lynndie England holds the leash of the naked, bearded Iraqi,” wrote Fisk. “No sadistic movie could outdo the damage of this image. In September 2001, the planes smashed into the buildings; today, Lynndie smashes to pieces our entire morality with just one tug on the leash.”
Who’s straining at the leash here? Down, boy. But, if Lynndie’s smashed to pieces our entire morality with just one tug, Bush’s Zionist neocons getting it on with Congolese kindergarteners would have the Independent calling for US expulsion from the UN – no, wait, from Planet Earth: slice it off from Maine to Hawaii and use one of those new Euro-Airbuses to drag it out round the back of Uranus.
But systemic UN child sex in at least 50 per cent of their missions? The transnational morality set can barely stifle their yawns. If you’re going to rape prepubescent girls, make sure you’re wearing a blue helmet.

The Torture Problem

Sebastian Holsclaw (link via Yglesias) says those of us on the Right ought to do more to denounce the use of torture by the United States in general, and the practice of “rendering” terror-related suspects to countries that have no restraint about torture in particular. (See also more links he supplies to a must-read New Yorker article here that actually quotes non-anonymous sources and here to a collection of blog links). Holsclaw also argues that now – with things going fairly well in Iraq and the presidential election behind us – is the most opportune moment to get some momentum on this subject. He’s right.
Like, I think, a lot of people on the Right, I’ve been hesitant to wade into this issue, for a bunch of reasons. Partly it’s the fact that this is a hard issue to get a factual handle on, if you want to get a realistic view of what’s actually happening, why, to and by whom, and what the legal framework is; I keep putting off writing about this stuff thinking that there’s another 50-page memo or 70-page court decision I ought to have read (although I did read one of the big 50+ page Gonzales memos, and honestly it just looked like typical lawyer advice to me: here’s what the statutes say, here’s how they’ve been interpreted, here’s where we think the legal lines are). And partly, yes, it’s the incessant bait-and-switching by the Left (including the media) – the efforts to connect the Abu Ghraib sexual and other abuses to so-called “torture memos” despite a complete absence of evidence that the prison guards involved had any knowledge of internal White House legal memoranda; the effort to stretch the word “torture” to cover nearly anything that sounded remotely unpleasant and denounce anyone who tried to make reasoned distrinctions as an apologist for terror; the inability to distinguish between moral standards and legal standards; the constant and entirely beside-the-point invocation of the Geneva Conventions; and so forth. To say nothing of the need to separate fact from, well, Seymour Hersh. But again, Holsclaw is right that at some point, we have to put our heads down and focus on what’s actually going on and what should be done about it, and not use the Left as an excuse to duck the issue.
(I’m not touching here on the issue of due process and detainees, which is a whole ‘nother ball of wax for another day.)
On general principles, I suspect that my own views on torture are probably not far from those of a lot of people on this issue:
1. I’d agree that there are a number of different cases against torture – a moral case against extreme mistreatment of fellow human beings, a practical case against torture as an effective means of interrogation, a legal case, a case that torture encourages our enemies to do the same to our people, and a case that any hint of torture harms our public image abroad. But I’m not so sure I’d agree that each case is coextensive – while I understand the argument that torture winds up yielding a lot of useless information, I think it’s probably likely that at least in some situations, things we shouldn’t do for other reasons might turn out to be effective on a practical level. And it’s certainly true that, in this war at least, our enemies have no restraints on their behavior no matter how we ourselves act. And, of course, we’ll get some types of bad p.r. around the world from the Seymour Hershes and Robert Fisks of the world pretty much regardless of what the actual facts are. Arguing otherwise on any of these counts really tends to gloss over some of the real trade-offs and moral dilemmas we face between the need for effective intelligence-gathering and things we can’t and shouldn’t try to morally justify.
2. The Geneva Conventions have nothing to do with this issue, and are perhaps the single biggest red herring in the whole argument. The Geneva Conventions are a treaty. They bind the signatory nations to grant certain types of treatment to the uniformed combatants of other signatory nations. You can find good summaries of this issue by the National Review here (part of the article is subscription-only) and here, and by Jay Tea at Wizbang here and here. Among other things, NR notes that the Geneva Conventions require that captured POWs receive “dormitories, kitchenettes, sports equipment, canteens, and a monthly pay allowance in Swiss francs”; in fact, because the Geneva Conventions are focused entirely on wartime nations’ interest in taking uniformed combatants off the battlefield rather than on interrogation, “[e]ven tempting detainees who are POWs with a candy bar to answer questions beyond name, rank and serial number violates the Third Geneva Convention.”
Yes, say some on the Left, but we should take the noble step of complying even if our enemies don’t, so we don’t become like them . . . see, this is one of the biggest divides between Right and Left: the Left tends to see treaties as gestures of American good faith and submission to multinational rules; as ends in and of themselves. But if you take treaties seriously, you have to remember what they are: agreed-upon bilateral frameworks of incentives. A treaty just formalizes a carrot-and-stick approach: if you do A we will do B; if you don’t do X we won’t do Y. This just keeps coming up: the Left wanted us to sign the Kyoto treaty even though we were only one of, if memory serves, either one or two of the world’s six largest nations that would have been bound by it; the Left wanted Israel to have treaties with Arafat without any mechanism to punish the Palestinians for violating the treaties; the Left wanted more negotiations and more treaties with North Korea instead of any consequences for violating the last treaty; the Left successfully demanded that the U.S. do nothing when the North Vietnamese violated the treaty that ended the Vietnam War with an independent South Vietnam; the Left wanted us not to resume hostilities with Saddam Hussein when he violated the terms of the 1991 cease-fire. But if we just give away the benefits of treaties without requiring anything in return, we lose the ability to use treaties to get anything we want. (This is the same basic rule the Right applies in economic debates to reforming welfare for the poor or cutting taxes for the rich: everybody responds to incentives).
3. Of course, getting back to Sebastian’s point, just because the Geneva Conventions don’t and shouldn’t apply, and just because practices like “extraordinary rendition” may be legal, doesn’t answer the moral and policy question of whether they are the right thing to do. Sometimes, we can’t let the law do all our thinking for us. We have to make our own judgments.
4. It’s also true that something can be wrong without being “torture.” The simplest definition of tourture is the infliction of lasting or permanent physical harm. Most of us would probably extend that definition further, to the infliction of intense physical pain, whether or not it leaves a mark.
I think a lot of what appalled people about Abu Ghraib was the psycho-sexual stuff. A lot of that really doesn’t seem like “torture,” things like stacking up a bunch of guys naked; humiliation, yes, torture, no. But the Right tends to get boxed in sometimes to by resisting the argument that if it’s bad, it must be torture. Sexual humiliation is bad, regardless of what label you put on it.
5. On the specific subject of what are and are not acceptable practices, I don’t have any problem with some of the coercive interrogation techniques that have been widely mooted about, things like sleep deprivation and “stress positions,” and we can have a fair debate about some of the other stuff, where the line should be drawn. I’m probably not alone in thinking you draw the line a little further out if you are dealing with known insurgents rather than witnesses with unknown affilitions, a little further out if you’re dealing with foreign fighters rather than Iraqis, a little further out yet with known hardened Al Qaeda terrorists. That said, do I know myself where the right line is? No. And I think it would be productive to give a fresh look at this issue that focuses prospectively on what we want the rules of the road to be, rather than wasting time debating existing structures like the Geneva Conventions or wallowing in efforts to play “gotcha” over who has done what up to now. That’s particularly where I think Senate and House Republicans could and should lead the way in putting together at least some general guidelines for the future, even despite the obvious and sensible objection to using statutes to micromanage things like interrogation of terrorists. This link-filled Instapundit post is a great place to start in terms of examining the issue.
6. Returning to the issue of rendition, the New Yorker article undoubtedly oversimplifies the issue (if these are allies, can we refuse to hand over anyone they have a warrant out for?), and there may be legitimate needs for the program in some sense, but there’s no escaping the bottom line that, whatever our rules are or should be, if there are things we wouldn’t want to do to people in custody ourselves, we shouldn’t hand them over to somebody else to do it, period.
UPDATE: John Cole has some detailed background on “extraordinary rendition.” Like I said, I’m less concerned about demonizing the overall practice than about its specific use in routing people to foreign governments for the purpose of having them tortured.

From The Ground Up

Absolute required reading: “Black Hawk Down” author Mark Bowden (reporting through the eyes of one of the veterans of Mogadishu) on the difficulties of building a new NCO and officer corps in the Iraqi Army. Bowden suggests that conventional wisdom may be wrong on one major point:

It has become generally accepted wisdom that it was a mistake for the Coalition Provisional Authority to disband Saddam’s army after American forces took Baghdad two years ago. If Maj. Lechner’s experience is typical, then retaining the old force would have just created a whole different set of problems, and might well have further set back efforts to create a flexible, effective Iraqi army. Solving the problem in the 7th Battalion ultimately required rooting out nearly all of those officers who had served under the old regime.

As I wrote back in October:

[I]n almost all cases, the decisions by Bush and his civilian and military advisers involved avoiding alternatives that had their own potential bad consequences, and the critics are judging these decisions in a vacuum. The decision to disband Saddam’s army and undergo a thorough de-Ba’athification is a classic example, cited incessantly by critics on the Left. But what if Bush had kept that army together, and they had acted in the heavy-handed (to put it mildly) fashion to which the Ba’athists were accustomed, say, by firing on crowds of civilians? Isn’t it an absolute certainty that all the same critics would be singing “meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” accusing Bush’s commitment to democracy as being a sham and a cover for a desire to set up friendly tyrants to keep the oil pumping, that we’d hear constantly about how we’ve alienated the Iraqi people by enabling their oppressors, how we showed misunderstanding of the country by leaving a minority Sunni power structure in place over the Shi’ite majority? Wouldn’t we hear the very same things we hear now about Afghanistan, about using too few US troops and “outsourcing” the job, or the same civil-liberties concerns we hear when we turn over suspects for interrogation to countries without our restraint when it comes to torture?

I still have no way to judge if disbanding the old army was the right thing to do, and Bowden explains why, either way, the task ahead may yet be long and difficult (although the end result, if it works, could be the most effective military in the region other than Israel and Turkey, given that similar problems with the officer and NCO corps abound in Arab militaries).

A Response to Juan Cole

I, for one, am sicker than sick of the “chicken hawk” argument, which I’ve dealt with on this site so frequently as to be not worth linking back to them all. But the latest salvo from Juan Cole in his feud with Jonah Goldberg prompted me to write this email in response, which I reprint here:

Dear Prof. Cole:

I read with interest your latest comments to the effect that all men in their 30s who support a war should go fight it, whether or not they would be in any way qualified to be soldiers, and are “coward[s] and hypocrite[s]” otherwise. According to the CIA factbook, the United States has 73 million men between the ages of 15 and 49 available for military service. Surely, we need every one of those under arms, and can accept tens of millions of additional soldiers – the nearsighted, the scrawny, the overweight – without compromising the quality of our armed forces, much in the way that the University of Michigan faculty could easily offer teaching positions to all the University’s graduates without compromising its quality.

I would suggest the following additions to your proposal:

1. If you are not prepared to walk a beat, or at a minimum to purchase a gun and defend your own home, you are a coward and a hypocrite if you call the police when someone breaks into your house or your car. How dare anyone ask police officers to put their lives in danger and potentially take a bullet for the rest of us, if they are not prepared to do the same? In fact, if you are not yourself prepared to take a bullet for George W. Bush, it is positively immoral and hypocritical for you not to call for an end to the Secret Service.

2. If you are not prepared to run into burning buildings, please do not call the fire department if your house catches fire, or offer encouragement to anyone else who would do so. That would make you a coward and a hypocrite, and nobody wants to see that.

3. For that matter, you are a coward and a hypocrite if you criticize the conduct of policemen, soldiers (such as the Israeli Defense Forces), or prison guards (such as the guards at Abu Ghraib) if you are unwilling to walk a mile in their shoes. How many books have you even read on military interrogation methods, let alone attempted to maintain order and collect intelligence in a prison setting? Certainly, you can not advocate different methods of doing so if you have not volunteered to endure the daily routine of a prison guard.

4. Finally, I suggest a simple and painless way to resolve this dispute. How about we ask all of Jonah Goldberg’s readers who are serving or have served in Iraq to write in support of him, and ask all of the readers of “Informed Comment” who are serving or have served in Iraq to write in support of you, and thereby settle once and for all whose opinions have the support of those men and women who are not, by the standard you have set forth, cowards and hypocrites? After all, if one is to use experience and authority as the sole sources of wisdom on matters of war and peace, then the voices of those who have actually been there and done that should count for the most, no?

Dominos

Drezner notes more positive consequences from the Iraq elections. And here’s Tom Friedman on the Arab press and the elections:

These guys I believe deliberately missed it. And really misled their readers. And they don’t have egg on their face. They have an omelet on their face this morning.

And on the Iraq War in general:

I went through angst during these last three years, thinking, my God, have I been behind something that’s going to be the biggest catastrophe in American foreign policy? It still might. But at least, after these elections, there is now a chance for a decent outcome. And Howie, if this works, this is going to be bigger, in my view — this is going to be the biggest thing since Napoleon invaded Egypt. This is really, really big.

A Man, A Plan, Iran

Condoleazza Rice, meeting with Tony Blair, stresses that we are not yet at the point of armed conflict with the Iranian mullahs. Andrew McCarthy says no serious person should object to news that the U.S. has been developing war plans to deal with the possibility of war with Iran. True enough on both scores – but what is the Administration’s affirmative plan for Iran? We got a glimpse Wednesday night in the State of the Union Address:

To promote peace in the broader Middle East, we must confront regimes that continue to harbor terrorists and pursue weapons of mass murder. Syria still allows its territory, and parts of Lebanon, to be used by terrorists who seek to destroy every chance of peace in the region. You have passed, and we are applying, the Syrian Accountability Act — and we expect the Syrian government to end all support for terror and open the door to freedom. Today, Iran remains the world’s primary state sponsor of terrorpursuing nuclear weapons while depriving its people of the freedom they seek and deserve. We are working with European allies to make clear to the Iranian regime that it must give up its uranium enrichment program and any plutonium reprocessing, and end its support for terror. And to the Iranian people, I say tonight: As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you.
Our generational commitment to the advance of freedom, especially in the Middle East, is now being tested and honored in Iraq. . . And the victory of freedom in Iraq will strengthen a new ally in the war on terror, inspire democratic reformers from Damascus to Tehran, bring more hope and progress to a troubled region, and thereby lift a terrible threat from the lives of our children and grandchildren.

(Emphasis mine; the promotion of Syria to this kind of treatment in the State of the Union speech is also momentous). Regime Change Iran thinks that Bush is maneuvering to pressure Iran on human rights, a common ground that will be palatable to the EU and UN. (via Instapundit). This may be right, but it seems a bit narrow – I don’t think it was idle chatter for Bush to stress Iran’s role as the leading state sponsor of terror. I suspect that he’ll try to pressure Iran on multiple grounds and not just human rights, with sponsorship of terrorists being also on the table. But the blogger’s point about the coming Iranian election in June suggests a flashpoint – we may try to use the examples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and the Palestinian Authority to drum up international support for microscopic scrutiny of Iran’s election process (although a fair vote is meaningless if the candidates are still hand-picked or their offices are powerless).
I’m happy to see the debate shift away from too great a focus on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, which can be notoriously difficult to ascertain from afar, and onto the nature of its regime, which is the real problem. At the end of the day, after all, our gripe with the Iranians’ terror-sponsoring tyranny, not with their having weapons. This ties into a point Stanley Kurtz made the other day about Iraq (scroll down to “Korea and Iraq” if the link doesn’t work) -i.e., that Iraq’s ability to get WMDs from outside sources like North Korea means that the actual state of its stocks of those weapons was far less important than its intentions and behavior. As I’ve said since before the invasion, the problem was the nature of the regime itself:

The test for whether we should seek regime change should be whether a regime has (1) the desire to attack civilian targets outside the context of an openly declared war and (2) has or is working on the means to do so, or to give aid and comfort to those who do so. Number (1) is the key, and it’s not always susceptible to hard proof, but the best evidence of a regime’s desire to attack American or other civilians is the level of anti-American vitriol in its official statements. It amazes me that people debating the merits of these things always tell us to ignore what the other guy says. Evidence of past complicity in terrorism, or past aggressive wars by the same basic regime (by which I mean the guy in power or predecessors in the same unelected junta, not ancient history) are also key. Try a little common sense, and it’s not hard to figure out who our enemies really are. There are a million little ways that a regime shows itself to be unwilling to abide by the basic norms of international behavior (by which I mean standards other nations actually live by, not pie-in-the-sky ideals like Kyoto), and when you add them up it’s easy to discern the difference between countries with weapons of mass destruction (“WMD”) that merely disdain us but would never do violence to us (i.e., France) and places like Iraq and North Korea and Cuba and Syria and Iran that don’t respect the rights of their own people or anyone else’s in the day-to-day commerce of nations. Look for countries that don’t allow free foreign press, just as a sample.

The key problem with Saddam was neither his possession of WMDs nor his ability to acquire them, but rather his intent – we knew he could be ruthless enough to use chemical weapons in battle and against his own people, we knew he had shown a willingness to work with terrorists, and we knew he was known to do things that were not, at least by our standards, rational (the best example of which was when he tried to have George HW Bush blown up). All these “well, if you go after Saddam, where does it stop” arguments always ignored the fact that the key issue was Saddam’s behavior and state of mind, not his capabilies. If we didn’t learn that from seeing a handful of guys armed with box cutters kill 3,000 people, we never will.
And that’s why Iran and Syria stand ahead of other countries that may have arsenals of weapons or deprive their people of rights – because the overall track record of the regimes’ hostility to the U.S. and support for terrorism makes them a threat. Hopefully, Bush will turn the screws on Iran in multiple directions to try to get another rehime of that nature out of power.

Fallujah Unspun

The Green Side has another email from a Marine in Fallujah who points out that, for all of the Western press’ spin about how Fallujah was an unimportant battle because the insurgents could get away and melt back into the countryside, that’s not what the insurgents were telling their own people before the battle, which is why the victory there has been so important:

Part of the motivation for the attack on insurgents in Fallujah back in November was to set the conditions for successful elections to be held 30 January. . . If the insurgent leadership headquarted inside the city was not directly projecting operations to cities as far away as Basrah or Mosul, their activities and overt posture undoubtedly inspired insurgents in other parts of the country to continue.
Once the Marines, Soldiers and Sailors were finally turned loose on the muj in the city, they dealt the enemy a crushing defeat. As I have described to you earlier, one of the most effective weapons the insurgents have employed to date is their propaganda. They lord over the people of Iraq by maintaining a very credible atmosphere of fear and intimidation. However, they also focus their information efforts inward.
When recruiting a 22-year-old Syrian or sustaining the morale of a 19-year-old Saudi, the mantra concerning Fallujah was common: “The Americans will never enter the city. They are afraid to fight us face-to-face and their people will never accept the casualties necessary to remove us from the city.” We know this to be true. Their information efforts were very effective and resulted in a brazen defiance among the muj and a life of fear and subjugation among the people.
When the Marines finally took the city, it was a tremendous psychological defeat to the enemy in addition to the obvious tremendous losses in enemy personnel and supplies. The dogged, relentless pursuit lead by the Captains and Sergeants in hunting down the final pockets of enemy inside the city and destroying them in exceptionally close and violent engagements following the main battle further cemented November’s losses. It is becoming obvious that the inescapable reality of the insurgents’ plight and the foundation of lies upon which they pinned their cause in the end was both obvious to them and to the population that was watching closely from the edges of the city as well.

(Link via Instapundit)

Gas Poisoning

The prime minister of Georgia, Zurab Zhvania, died of “gas poisoning” at a friend’s house, under circumstances that thus far don’t seem to clearly indicate whether the death was an accident or foul play, although they are calling it an accident for now:

An Iranian-made gas-powered heating stove was in the main room of the mezzanine-floor apartment, where a table was set up with a backgammon set lying open upon it, Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili said in a televised statement reported by The Associated Press.
Zhvania was in a chair; Usupov’s body was found in the kitchen. Security guards tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate the prime minister, Merabishvili said. “It all happened suddenly,” he said.
“It is an accident,” Merabishvili said. “We can say that poisoning by gas took place.”
Asked if foul play was suspected, [Vice Premier Georgy] Baramidze told CNN it appeared to be accidental, although “there are lots of enemies of Georgia that might have wished him dead.”