BUSINESS: Negotiating Through The Media

There are many species of bad journalism, most of which involve too much opinion by the writer, but sometimes the opposite is true and a writer gives you the apparent facts without the context needed to make sense of them. Let me use an article from the NY Times about 30 Rock to illustrate a common type of bad journalism that I find to be equally amusing and annoying: reporting negotiating positions without bothering to explain to the reader to take negotiating positions with a grain of salt, let alone how to interpret statements made in the course of negotiations. This has been a common thread in scores of articles these past few months about – among other topics – the debt ceiling negotiations, the Libya war, the perpetual Israel-Palestine ‘peace process,’ the NFL and NBA labor negotiations, the Mets’ legal dispute with the Madoff trustee and other business machinations and their efforts to re-sign Jose Reyes, and the legal imbroglio surrounding the Dodgers. I’ve read more articles on all these topics than I could count that failed to give the reader the guidance to put the parties’ statements in the context of the underlying negotiating dynamics.
The Times tells us, first, that Alec Baldwin has said he’s leaving 30 Rock after next season, a departure that of course would be a terrible blow to a show built around the tensions between his (awesome) character, Jack Donaghy, and Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon. It may well be true that Baldwin sincerely has other things on his mind, maybe even a run for public office, and/or that he’s feeling he’s done all he could with the character. But it’s at least equally likely that he could be persuaded to stay on if NBC offers money or other contractual concessions to make it worth his while.
Then we get the response from NBC brass and from Lorne Michaels, the show’s executive producer:

Executives from the show and NBC aren’t sure, but they made it clear in interviews here this week that his departure would not mean an automatic end to the award-winning comedy.
NBC’s new entertainment chairman, Bob Greenblatt, said: “I’d love nothing more than to have Alec for the duration of the show. That’s my goal. Let’s see what we get.”
NBC’s interest in keeping “30 Rock” around for at least one more year after the coming season can be explained by the need for more episodes to enhance the show’s resale value in syndication.
The executive producer of “30 Rock,” Lorne Michaels, was more definitive about a future for the comedy, even if Mr. Baldwin turns down all blandishments to continue. “I would hope he would want to go on,” Mr. Michaels said on Monday. “But we’re going to keep doing the show.”

Again: I don’t doubt that NBC would very much like to extend the show’s run one extra season for syndication purposes; many a sitcom past has been kept on past its proverbial shark-jumping point for that reason. If 30 Rock is still making money at that point, the network would probably try to soldier on without Baldwin. And Lorne Michaels has never been a guy who thought any of his cast members were indispensable (to put it mildly). But this all smacks strongly of a negotiating posture: the network and Michaels are doing interviews here precisely to send Baldwin the message that he’s not holding all the cards. And the reporter, Bill Carter, doesn’t breathe a word of that, probably because he knows full well why they are giving him these interviews.
Of course, Greenblatt and Michaels have their own competing agendas:

Mr. Greenblatt did open the door to a possible disagreement with Mr. Michaels over the re-entry of “30 Rock” onto NBC’s schedule. The show’s sixth-season premiere has been postponed until midseason because of the pregnancy of its star, Tina Fey.
Asked if “30 Rock” was ensured a spot back on NBC’s successful Thursday night comedy lineup, Mr. Greenblatt said, “That is a good question, and I really don’t have an answer for it.” He added, “Nothing’s written in stone.”
But as far as Mr. Michaels is concerned, it is. “The show will be back on Thursdays,” he said confidently.

Of course, if Baldwin’s future with the show is in doubt, that’s one reason the network would not want to commit valuable Thursday night prime-time space, plus Greenblatt is taking charge of a fourth-place network and probably should keep his options open. But NBC has to keep Michaels happy, too; as the creator of Saturday Night Live, he remains a vital part of the network’s brand image. Michaels’ certainty here is obviously intended to send an unsubtle message that he will not be a happy camper if the network moves his prime-time baby out of its Thursday night sinecure.
I don’t mean to pick on Carter, who in this article has at least offered us enough quotes from each of the participants that a skeptical reader can piece together what is really being said here; that’s not always the case with this sort of journalism. But in general, reporters aren’t doing their jobs if they don’t report how someone involved in negotiations could stand to gain from taking a particular position in public, and worse still if they straight-facedly claim that someone will never make a particular concession (e.g., Jose Reyes won’t talk about a new contract during the season), when in fact they might well do so for the right price. The dynamics of negotiations and how they are handled through the media can differ across situations, but there are a finite number of basic underlying approaches to negotiating, and they crop up across many different fields of endeavor.
Consider the debt ceiling debate – surely many Republicans would have preferred to pass ‘cut, cap and balance,’ and some were genuinely opposed to raising the debt ceiling at all. But for many people involved in the fight, pushing for the ideal policy, even if it was the policy they wanted, was also a matter of getting leverage to extract a better deal when the time came to compromise. Similarly, many Republicans sincerely opposed any deal that would raise any taxes at all; others may have been willing to trade some revenue-raisers for something better, but found it convenient to stay in line with the ATR pledge against tax hikes as a posture unless and until that better offer materialized. None of this is insincere; it’s just good bargaining.
Learn to look for the signs of negotiating postures between the lines of news articles, and they will surface again and again in every section of the paper.

The Goatherd

One of the more notorious examples of the hysterical overreaction of critics overcome by their hatred of George W. Bush was their harping on him taking a few minutes to finish reading a children’s book (The Pet Goat) to a classroom full of second-graders on the fateful morning of September 11 after getting the first news of the day’s terror attacks. But if you’ve ever had children, you may appreciate TIME Magazine’s look back at that incident through the eyes of some of the kids in that classroom – then 7 year olds, now teenagers – who were glad for Bush’s calming presence in reading to them on that most insane of mornings.
As Ace notes, while Bush was pilloried for waiting in that classroom for seven minutes while his security detail got in place to get him moving, Obama has been hailed as a model of swift deciveness for concluding in just sixteen hours to go forward with the operation against bin Laden. Like Ace, I’m not going to quibble over Obama taking some time to make up his mind on a major decision – you can’t argue with the results, and 16 hours isn’t like his months of indecision on the Afghan surge or weeks of agonizing while the Libyan resistance got routed – but the people who made fun of Bush for seven minutes of reading to some kids can’t very well expect to be taken seriously when they now parade Obama as a paragon of decisive action.

Inconvenient Facts About The Takedown of Osama bin Laden

One good rule of thumb if you are arguing politics – or practicing law, as I do – is that if your argument requires you to prove that something never happens or somebody does nothing good or right, you have started off with two strikes against you. Never is a hard thing to prove and an easy one to disprove. In the real world, bad ideas work sometimes, bad people do good things sometimes, brilliant plans fail sometimes, and time and chance happen to us all. This is, in fact, why the wise conservative recognizes the wisdom of crowds and the benefit of tradition: things must be tried many times by many people to see what works most, and what works in one situation may not work in another. Thus, while we can fairly debate the respective amount of credit given to President Obama and his senior advisors for taking out Osama bin Laden, there is no useful cause served in arguing that the Administration should get no credit. Many national leaders far worse than Obama have done something right in office. In the long run, Obama’s political success will stand or fall on his record as a whole.
A related caution is that the early news reports of almost anything are liable to be wrong, especially in wartime. I took great pleasure in the report offered by Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan that Osama bin Laden had died using one of his wives as a shield, but we are still seeing questions raised by some anonymous sources over the accuracy of Brennan’s statements. Even if Brennan’s account holds up, it may not be the last thing reported by the media regarding bin Laden’s death that turns out not to be true.
With those two cautions in mind, we must pity the dilemma of the anti-war Left in facing the enormously popular and inarguably successful takedown of bin Laden.
To the mere Democratic partisan, there is no real conflict: as long as people like the results achieved under President Obama, his party wins. But the anti-war Left spent most of the Bush years shrieking to high heaven about Bush shredding the Constitution, staining the integrity of the nation, yadda yadda yadda. Everything he did in pursuing the War on Terror had to be the WORST THING EVER, and every effort made to argue that you were beyond the pale of civilization if you approved of the Iraq War, the detention of unlawful combatants at Guantanamo Bay or various secret CIA facilities, the use of “enhanced” coercive interrogation techniques (or for that matter any interrogation outside the Geneva Convention’s name-rank-serial number questioning of traditional POWs), or the “assassination” of terrorists. This is the politics of outrage, the idea that you win arguments by being the angriest man in the room, that rather than argue that policies are not worth the costs and tradeoffs that come with every successful policy, they were inarguably wrong in every particular.
Consider the waterboarding debate. As it turns out, the CIA only waterboarded three men (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri), leading to the question of why the Left made such a colossal stink about it in the first place. Certainly, given those facts, nobody on the Right has argued that waterboarding or any other form of coercive interrogation should be the only or even the first recourse in interrogation (or even that they be used at all with criminal defendants or legitimate prisoners of war) – the argument is simply that these are sometimes-useful tools in an interrogator’s toolkit and that, in some extreme hard cases, it can be justifiable to use those tools against the very worst hard-core senior terrorist leaders. But critics of waterboarding have mostly long since painted themselves into the corner of insisting that the tradeoffs involved don’t need to be debated, because coercive interrogation never yields any information of any use in any situation.
This is poor ground to make a stand on.
Initial reports on the extensive detective work that led to cornering bin Laden have indicated a couple of things that are terribly inconvenient for these arguments. First, it appears that the initial lead that allowed bin Laden to be tracked down was the name of his courier (he used one or more couriers so he could stay off cell phones and the internet, a lesson he learned after a criminal trial revealed that our intelligence services were tracking him by cell phone), and that the nom de guerre of the courier was provided by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi to CIA interrogators. Both men had been held at precisely the sorts of “secret prisons” the Left denounced, and both subjected to coercive interrogation; in KSM’s case he was one of the three men waterboarded. The Left, being unable to accept even the possibility that waterboarding might have contributed anything ever to anyone, has sprung into full damage-control mode, but inadvertently made many of conservatives’ points for us. For example, ThinkProgress apparently thinks it is helping the cause by quoting Don Rumsfeld on the key leads coming from “normal interrogation tactics” at Guantanamo. But of course, if you spent years arguing that Guantanamo should be shuttered and all detainees subjected to the Geneva Conventions and tried in civilian courts, accepting this premise destroys your entire argument. Spencer Ackerman makes a lengthier effort to distance the information given by KSM and al-Libi to CIA interrogators:

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003, with al-Libbi following suit in 2005. A U.S. official tells the Associated Press reports that Mohammed gave up the courier’s nom de guerre, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, while in one of the CIA’s brutal “black site” prisons. As Marcy Wheeler notes, that’s not the same thing as saying the 183 waterboarding sessions Mohammed received led interrogators to the nom de guerre. But let’s be charitable to them and presume it did. According to the Washington Post, al-Libbi confirmed the alias as well.
From what we know so far, that’s about all waterboarding yielded for the hunt for al-Kuwaiti.
The senior administration official told reporters on Sunday that “for years, we were unable to identify his true name or his location.” It took until “four years ago” – 2007, then – for intelligence officials to learn al-Kuwaiti’s real name. By then, President Bush had ceased waterboarding and shuttered the black sites, moving the detainees within them, including Mohammed and al-Libbi, to Guantanamo Bay. In a Monday interview, Donald Rumsfeld said “normal” interrogation techniques were used at Gitmo on those detainees.

Once again, Ackerman has to concede basically every other piece of the Left’s argument – against GTMO, against CIA interrogation, against secret CIA prisons – in order to protect the Holy Grail of arguing that waterboarding never, ever, ever works. What he’s left with is the contention that when a guy confesses to the good cop, that means the bad cop was not a factor in anything that followed (the phrase “fruit of the poisonous tree” may ring a bell to some lawyers). And oh, yeah, those two guys gave up the lead that started it all.
It gets worse for Ackerman’s side:

It took more traditional sleuthing to get al-Kuwaiti’s real name, according to the Times. That meant putting more operatives on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan to track him, yielding a partial name. Once they had that, they unleashed “one of their greatest investigative tools”: the National Security Agency’s surveillance net. The NSA monitored email and phone traffic until they had his full name: Shaikh Abu Ahmed.
Last summer, the Associated Press reports, al-Kuwaiti/Ahmed made a fatal mistake: he called someone under NSA surveillance. After showing up on the grid, CIA operatives on the ground were able to hunt him.

You will note the absence of any reference to the NSA getting a search warrant for this. Once again, after all the huffing and puffing and lawsuits about NSA surveillance, it turns out that it, too, played a part in tracking down Public Enemy #1.
Are we done yet? No, we’re not. Thankfully, due perhaps to being off the internet grid, bin Laden wasn’t tipped off to the fact that we were on his trail by the fact that WikiLeaks had disclosed files showing we had tracked the courier by name to Abbottabad. But from WikiLeaks’ files we learn something else very interesting:

The file suggests that the courier’s identity was provided to the US by another key source, the al-Qaida facilitator Hassan Ghul, who was captured in Iraq in 2004 and interrogated by the CIA. Ghul was never sent to Guantanamo but was believed to have been taken to a prison in Pakistan.
He told the Americans that al-Kuwaiti travelled with bin Laden. The file states:
“Al-Kuwaiti was seen in Tora Bora and it is possible al-Kuwaiti was one of the individuals [al-Qahtani] reported accompanying UBL [bin Laden] in Tora Bora prior to UBL’s disappearance.”
The picture that emerges from al-Qahtani’s Guantanamo file supports statements given in the last 24 hours by US officials, who named Ghul as the “linchpin” in the intelligence operation to find bin Laden.

So much for the idea that the Iraq War yielded us no benefits in the hunt for bin Laden.
Is all of this the last word on how bin Laden was tracked down? Of course not. As I said at the outset, we are likely to learn a good deal more, and perhaps unlearn some things that have already been reported. But that’s why it’s not a good idea to make arguments that only work if the other side is 100% wrong about everything. It’s why Attorney General Holder professes himself agnostic as to whether “enhanced” interrogation contributed anything to getting bin Laden and Press Secretary Carney won’t answer the same question. The American people seem to know better; while the first poll on the subject gives good marks to President Obama for handling bin Laden, his approval rating tops out at a bump up to 56%, 51% (including more than a third of Democrats) also say that President Bush deserves some credit as well. Certainly the facts as we know them right now support the conclusion that you can’t separate the capture of bin Laden from the multifaceted Bush approach to counterterrorism that produced the witnesses and leads that let the intelligence and defense apparatus do its job in running the investigation – and Osama bin Laden – to ground.

Yub Nub

Note to regular readers: being short on time, I refer you to my Twitter feed for more of my thoughts on the death of Osama bin Laden.
From this:

To this:

Let joy be unconstrained! Justice has finally reched Osama bin Laden. Like Adolf Eichmann, bin Laden could run but he couldn’t hide forever. Whatever your politics, credit should be shared first and foremost between (1) the CIA and other intelligence operatives for tracking down bin Laden and (2) the Joint Special Operations Command troops for carrying out an extremely hazardous mission to take him out.
But moving on to the politics and the policymakers, bin Laden’s death will no doubt provide a political victory to Barack Obama, who gave the order to have him taken out (after passing up a chance in March to drop massive bombs on his compound – a recognition that bin Laden’s death is more important as a visible symbol than as an operational matter) – but make no mistake that it is also a policy victory for conservatives.
One:

Officials say CIA interrogators in secret overseas prisons developed the first strands of information that ultimately led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Current and former U.S. officials say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, provided the nom de guerre of one of bin Laden’s most trusted aides. The CIA got similar information from Mohammed’s successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi. Both were subjected to harsh interrogation tactics inside CIA prisons in Poland and Romania.

More blow-by-blow here and here on how the initial interrogation strands developed during the Bush Administration led ultimately to yesterday’s raid (and reflect on Pakistan’s complicity – bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad was built in 2005). Also note the report that “One woman was also killed after one of the targeted men tried to use her as a human shield during the raid.” Bear in mind, bin Laden’s guards were presumably Al Qaeda’s most elite fighters. If your elite bodyguards’ go-to move in a firefight is hiding behind a woman, maybe you should dial back the bravado a wee bit. [UPDATE: Apparently it was bin Laden himself cowering behind a woman. Of course.]
Of course, conservatives have always argued that a viable intelligence-gathering apparatus requires not only interrogation of detainees but the full range of intelligence tools: electronic surveillance, covert operations, payoffs to seedy sources and defectors, occasional sub rosa cooperation with nasty regimes, and of course maximizing the information we get from having troops on the ground in foreign lands. The Left has spent the past decade deriding each of these sources. But if you celebrate the killing of bin Laden, bear in mind what had to be done to get him.
Two: the raid was carried out by a JSOC team that clearly had no compunction about shooting bin Laden twice in the head. You will remember when Seymour Hersh and Keith Olbermann breathlessly described JSOC as “a covert executive assassination ring that reported directly to Vice President Dick Cheney’s office”. You’re welcome.
Three: The Administration acted unilaterally in carrying out this mission. International institutions and alliances have their uses, but in the end, some things a nation has to do for itself.
Four: the reaction to bin Laden’s death has, predictably, smoked out the same nasty impulses among our enemies that led Saddam’s state-run media to laud the 9/11 attacks. Hamas and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood have both condemned bin Laden’s killing. No amount of whitewashing will change what these groups are. (More here on Hamas and the Palestinian Authority).

Ten Reflections On Libya


More here from Jon Stewart, who is also not buying Obama’s rationales.
I had intended to write up a longer or at any rate more organized essay about Libya, but for now, here are my two cents:
1. I was open initially, at least in theory, to the U.S. arming the rebels and enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya, on the theory that we could tip the balance in favor of the rebels without the need to commit ground troops. I don’t buy the theory that the U.S. has no stake in overthrowing Ghadafi* as a matter of national interest, as doing so may advance our broader strategic goal of changing the political structure of the Arab/Muslim world so as to break the status quo in which the only alternatives are (a) terror-sponsoring tyrannies and (b) tyrannies whose only credible opponents are Islamist terrorists. Probably the most glaring omission from the Administration’s arguments in favor of this action is any sense that this is part of a coherent regional or other strategy – nor could it be, given the Administration’s passivity in Egypt and its unwillingness to do anything to support opponents of the much more dangerous and hostile Iranian and Syrian regimes.
I don’t regard regime change in Libya as a sufficiently compelling interest that I’d want to commit ground troops to such a project – nobody has argued that the U.S. had cause or interest in starting a war with Khadaffy, as opposed to joining one in progress – but you don’t commit air assets unless you are willing to contemplate either ground forces to support them or just losing any pilots who get shot down.
2. I’m completely opposed to committing U.S. forces (air, ground, whatever) unless our goal is to destroy Quaddafi’s regime and we are committed to see that through to the end. Bad as Kadafy is, he’s been much more contained in recent years than Saddam ever was – among other things, surrendering his WMD programs to outside inspectors after seeing what George W. Bush did to Saddam – but if left in power after this, he will have much the same desire to make trouble for us that Saddam did after the first Gulf War. And more broadly, as I have explained before, the one indispensable prerequisite for using military force is defining who the enemy is and committing to defeat him. Doing less than that is worse than pointless. Unfortunately, Obama has been (depending how you interpret his oracular pronouncements) vague and/or contradictory on whether we are truly committed to eliminating Gaddafhi’s regime.
3. My openness to a no-fly zone in Libya decreased dramatically when we sat by and did nothing for over two critical weeks while all the rebel-held cities other than Benghazi fell back into the regime’s hands. Now, our arrival may be too little too late. Not only does toppling the regime without a major Allied military commitment look like a longer shot now, but specifically we gave the regime the time to move military assets into those cities. Air power is never more effective than against armored columns traveling in the open desert (Libya isn’t the mountains of Bosnia or the Ho Chi Minh Trail), but the regime is much more entrenched now in those urban positions. Things can change quickly in an unstable situation, but unlike in Afghanistan and Iraq there’s at least a significant chance right now that the regime we’ve bombed will still be standing a year from now, and what then?
In war, a questionable decision made swiftly is often better than a good one made too late. At least Sarah Palin, who supported a no-fly zone weeks before Obama, understood this. If anything, Obama’s reliance on the humanitarian argument (Benghazi will be flattened) suggests that he was more inclined to back the rebels as their chances of victory diminished. I am left with the creeping suspicion that Obama isn’t anti-war so much as he’s uncomfortable with American victory.
4. We also went into this with the average citizen having no clue what kind of people the rebels are, and apparently with U.S. policymakers not knowing a whole lot more. It increasingly appears they may be linked with Al Qaeda and participating in more than the usual atrocities attendant to civil wars in the Arab/Muslim world. Ghadaffy may be a bad guy, but he’s the devil we know, and the prospects for replacing him with something worse look even more problematic than they did in Egypt.
5. I’m fine with us working within NATO, but let’s not pretend that that means any less U.S. commitment. Or that Obama’s coalition is somehow superior to the multinational force in Iraq, which involved many more nations putting boots on the ground. As for going to Congress, there’s interesting Constitutional debate around what powers the President has to act militarily without Congressional approval (almost nobody disputes that he has some) and what power Congress has to restrict his existing Article II powers by statute, but if the Iraq experience convinced me of anything, it’s that Bush – and the mission – would have been in much worse shape in terms of popular support if he hadn’t gone to Congress in advance.
6. I’m not opposed to considering humanitarian concerns – or access to oil, for that matter – as a reason to go to war (they were one of numerous reasons for the Iraq War), but I’m very uncomfortable with using it as the sole justification for a war, especially when we self-evidently are not applying the same standard across the globe. Principles are important, but in the real world you can rarely afford to enforce them consistently; wars are ultimately a matter of national interest, and you can’t turn a principle into an interest just by calling it one. Nobody can possibly take seriously the idea that we are being entirely consistent here (we’ve watched many worse things unfold in sub-Saharan Africa).
7. This whole thing is going to cost a bunch of money. I generally pay little attention to financial cost in decisions about war and peace, on the grounds that if something is worth losing lives over, it’s necessarily going to be worth spending money on as well. But if the calculus here is that knocking out the regime can be done on the cheap, it becomes more relevant to consider the dollars as well.
8. Yes: given that bombing Libya is a close call and depends on a lot of pragmatic factors, it does matter that I don’t have any faith in the current Administration to carry out the fundamentals – i.e., defining the enemy and the objective – competently or in the best interests of the U.S.
9. Polls are showing at most 50% public support for this mission. That can’t be good news for Obama if this doesn’t wrap up quickly; the Iraq War and Vietnam both began with 80% public support (I’ve been reading Steven Hayward’s Age of Reagan, and he cites among other things a May 1967 Gallup poll that found only 14% support for withdrawing from Vietnam, compared to 25% support for nuking North Vietnam). If the mission goes badly, Obama will be left with nearly no support.
10. At least having a Democratic president means that we don’t have to listen to idiots arguing that the use of military force is illegitimate because neither the President, the Vice President nor the Secretary of State served in the military. That argument was never the province of remotely serious people anyway, let alone anyone who would use it consistently across partisan lines.

Continue reading Ten Reflections On Libya

Fall of the House of Mubarak

Today is a day for joy. Hosni Mubarak has stepped down immediately as President of Egypt. Following on the heels of the departure of Ben Ali in Tunisia, we are witnessing the hitherto unprecedented spectacle of the people of a Muslim Arab state rising up in protest, of their own initiative, and throwing off a remarkably well-entrenched dictator. We rejoice in the spectacle because we are Americans; it’s who we are. We know our system, even in the worst of hands, remains the best in the world, and we want to see others share in those same blessings.
But after the initial wave of joy subsides, the Egyptian crisis is far from over, and there are some important lessons to be learned.

Continue reading Fall of the House of Mubarak

Islam Fractures German Multiculturalism

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has just broken one of Europe’s greatest taboos. But the truth may prove more dangerous than the lies that preceded it.
Europe has a decidedly love-hate relationship with racial, cultural and religious pluralism. On the one hand, Europeans have no choice but to deal – more than do Americans – with a continent with a multiplicity of languages, they love to lecture ‘simplistic’ Americans about tolerance, and moreso than in the U.S., there’s a powerful taboo among the governing elite against even talking about cultural or social issues of any kind, let alone subjecting them to free public debate. On the other hand, there’s thousands of years of history of racial, ethnic and religious animosities tearing the continent apart and leading to many of human history’s worst atrocities. And with regard to specific case of Europe’s relationship with the Islamic world, think location, location, location: even places we think of as far distant lands – Algeria, Libya, Syria – are geographically right on Europe’s doorstep, and familiarity in Europe has often bred contempt, and worse. It was Europe that was invaded by Muslim imperialists pretty much continuously from the 700s (when Charles Martel stopped the Muslim advance into France at Poitiers) to the 1600s (when the Turks were stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683); Spain spent 700 years under Islamic rule, parts of the Balkans even longer. It was also Europeans who launched the Crusades, beginning some 300 years after Poitiers. European nationalism is not the conservative, free-market, liberty-oriented variety we have in the United States, and really never has been; it tends to be statist, befitting its feudal origins, and in recent centuries it has lost the restraining or at least balancing force of Christianity, as the continent has become less Christian.
The elite consensus has been placed under exceptional strain in the past decade by two symbiotic trends: the declining birthrates of native Europeans, who reproduce barely more than pandas, requiring large-scale immigration of young workers to make Europe’s welfare states even remotely sustainable; and the fact that those immigrants are predominantly Muslim and include large numbers of people who have no respect for pluralism of any kind. Put simply, Europe can’t live without Muslim immigration, but at some point, if demographic trends continue and the immigrants don’t drastically alter the extent of their cultural assimilation, it won’t really be Europe anymore.
We are only now seeing quite how traumatized Europe was by the riots over the Danish Muhammad cartoons in late 2005 and early 2006, a watershed in a long series of events across the continent in which Europeans were faced with behavior by the Muslim minority (or in some cases, almost now a majority) – usually involving violence or threatened violence – utterly inconsistent with pluralism of any kind. (Indeed, one of the great untold stories of the past decade is the extent to which events after September 11 have eroded the benefit of the doubt given by the public in the U.S. and Europe alike to the idea that Islam in practice is a peaceful faith and leached the credibility of leaders like George W. Bush who labored long and hard to draw distinctions between Islam’s majority and its terrorist minority.)
There is, of course, great debate to be had over issues of assimilation and cultural tension generally, and specifically over the extent to which Islam can or should be integrated into a pluralistic society in the way that Christianity, Judaism and other faiths have done in the West (albeit with always imperfect results). But the merits of that whole debate aside, what is newsworthy is that Europeans have started fighting back, and if history is any guide, there are real reasons to worry that the reaction will as bad as the problem. We’ve seen the early signs in France’s ban on the burqa and German authorities closing the Hamburg mosque where the September 11 attackers met.
Chancellor Merkel has now broken the elite consensus of silence wide open:

Germany’s attempt to create a multi-cultural society has failed completely, Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the weekend, calling on the country’s immigrants to learn German and adopt Christian values.
Merkel weighed in for the first time in a blistering debate sparked by a central bank board member saying the country was being made “more stupid” by poorly educated and unproductive Muslim migrants.
“Multikulti”, the concept that “we are now living side by side and are happy about it,” does not work, Merkel told a meeting of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party at Potsdam near Berlin.
“This approach has failed, totally,” she said, adding that immigrants should integrate and adopt Germany’s culture and values.
“We feel tied to Christian values. Those who don’t accept them don’t have a place here,” said the chancellor.
“Subsidising immigrants” isn’t sufficient, Germany has the right to “make demands” on them, she added, such as mastering the language of Goethe and abandoning practices such as forced marriages.

And there are signs that Merkel has public opinion on her side:

A recent study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation think tank showed around one-third of Germans feel the country is being “over-run by foreigners” and the same percentage feel foreigners should be sent home when jobs are scarce.
Nearly 60 percent of the 2,411 people polled thought the around four million Muslims in Germany should have their religious practices “significantly curbed.”
Far-right attitudes are found not only at the extremes of German society, but “to a worrying degree at the centre of society,” the think tank said in its report.

It’s easy to think today of European society as a static feature of the landscape that will ever be with us. But much of the continent was, little more than two decades ago, living under the yoke of tyranny. Stable government is a tenuous tradition in Southern Europe, we last had a significant coup attempt in France in 1958, and the last time we had religious war and something like genocide in Europe was in the mid-1990s. With demographic and fiscal crisis rising on the continent, we may yet be in for another time of turbulence in Europe. Germany, at the continent’s cultural, geographic and financial center, will be a crucial test of how it weathers that storm.

Turning The Page

I’d meant to work this into something larger on Obama’s speech last night, but it’s an interesting fact in its own right on how our politics have, in their natural course, mostly moved on from the Iraq War debate (for better and for worse): of the 77 Senators who voted to authorize the war back in October 2002, no more than 32 of them – 17 Republicans and 15 members of the Democratic caucus (i.e., including Lieberman) will still be in office come January (less if some fail to get re-elected, although Harry Reid’s the only one of the 32 in much hot water; of course, Hillary and Biden have moved on to higher positions). 14 of the 23 who voted against the war could be back, although three of those are currently embattled (Feingold, Murray, and Boxer). Any number of major figures on our national scene now, including Barack Obama, Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney, had yet to win statewide office at the time.
That’s reflective of a number of things, but most of all the changing of the guard as a lot of the Senate’s longest-standing veterans have died or retired and the rate of turnover has been accelerating with big Democratic gains in 2006 & 2008 and likely big Republican gains this year. The GOP will be getting a very fresh start – by January, we’ll have only 32 GOP Senators left who were elected before 2010 (and only 11 GOP Governors elected before 2010, including 2009-elected governors like Christie and McDonnell).

Obama Chooses Sides In Favor of the Ground Zero Mosque

Last night, as part of a Ramadan celebration, President Obama waded into the controversy over the Cordoba Initiative mosque within sight of Ground Zero. In so doing, he unambiguously chose sides with those who see this deliberate provocation as a positive good.
It is unsurprising, given what we already know about him, that President Obama would decline to support using government power to block the mosque project, and would decline to support withholding the various government favors needed to build it (although he carefully avoided mention of the State Department’s employment of the mosque’s Malaysian imam) – but he could have at a minimum used the opportunity to denounce in no uncertain terms what broad majorities of the public in and out of New York recognize: the fact that whatever the law says, the project itself is deeply and intentionally offensive. Especially when the president feels a matter is beyond his formal power, this is what the presidential bully pulpit is for. He has certainly not been shy in the past about speaking forcefully to denounce matters as provincial as a dispute between a professor and local cops in Cambridge. Instead, Obama offered only a tepid nod that failed to suggest he personally saw anything wrong with the selection of the Ground Zero location for a mosque:

Continue reading Obama Chooses Sides In Favor of the Ground Zero Mosque

The Ground Zero Mosque, Common Decency and the War

The debate over the “Ground Zero Mosque” presents two separate questions:
(1) Whether the mosque is wrong and should be stopped.
(2) Whether some arm of the government should be the ones to stop it.
Tellingly, liberal defenders of the project have talked almost exclusively about the second point, and avoided the first.
While I joined wholeheartedly in the RedState editorial last week condemning the project and calling for a halt to it, I’ve been a bit agnostic on the second point myself. There are constitutional and statutory restrictions on what the government can or should do to interfere with the building of houses of worship, and those restrictions exist for good reasons, even when in a particular case the house of worship represents a deliberate provocation. Even without the government’s involvement, the mosque project itself is indefensible on its merits, and can and should be subject to public criticism and shame and any other lawful private sanction that can be brought to bear against outrageous conduct (a point Ed Morrissey makes here).
But as we are now seeing, the government itself – including the Obama Administration – is more involved with the Cordoba Initiative behind the mosque than we had been led to believe, and its proponents are even more selective in their view of tolerance and dialogue. And one thing is very clear: this is not a strictly local issue in any sense. It is part of a crucial national debate.

Continue reading The Ground Zero Mosque, Common Decency and the War

Not In Charge

President Obama should fire General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, for a highly impolitic interview Gen. McChrystal gave to Rolling Stone magazine (of all places) mocking the Vice President and the U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan, among others, and making evident his disdain for the Administration’s civilian management of the war effort. Obama should fire him – but he’s painted himself into a corner in which doing so would be damaging to him politically and to the nation’s war effort. Let’s review why.
When Barack Obama came into office, he had an Afghanistan problem. Obama had won crucial credibility with the anti-war Left, and thus the Democratic presidential nomination, by opposing (at times) the Iraq War. At the same time, he marketed himself as being serious about national security by touting his support for the war in Afghanistan. Coming into office, he needed to reassure the military, the Afghan government and other U.S. allies, and the existing domestic supporters of the Afghan war (many of whom were Republicans unenthused about supporting any Obama initiative) that he was really serious. Complicating matters, the Democrats had spent the prior several years building a narrative in which the Bush Administration had sinned by not listening to criticism from the brass, and in which military men like Gen. Eric Shinseki (now Secretary of Veterans Affairs) were all but sainted for publicly splitting with the Bush Administration’s war management. Obama, having little credibility of his own on national security matters, could scarcely hope to survive a public battle with his own military leadership.
Obama got off to a rough start. First of all, he came to office with no executive experience, no national security experience (in the Senate he’d never bothered holding hearings on the subcommittee he chaired overseeing Afghanistan) and no military service record; his Vice President, while schooled in foreign affairs, was likewise a career legislator with no military service record, ditto his Secretary of State. He ended up with yet another legislator running the CIA after his first choice was seen by the Left as too tied to the intelligence community. To balance this team out (Presidents always lack something and need balance from their advisers, but Obama lacked more than most), he had to lean heavily on holdovers: he kept Bush’s Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, and gave wide latitude to General David Petraeus, architect of the Iraq War surge that Obama, Biden and Clinton had opposed with varying levels of scorn. He also picked a military man (Gen. James Jones) as his National Security Advisor, although that has worked out poorly.
Then, as I detailed back in September, Obama backed off his original promises for more troops in Afghanistan and sacked the commander there, General David McKiernan, in May 2009 after McKiernan asked for more troops. McKiernan was replaced with General Stanley McChrystal, a blunt-spoken counterinsurgency specialist and ally of General Petraeus who had something of a track record – known to those around him – of speaking out of turn.
McChrystal quickly lived up to that reputation, with speeches and an assessment of the Afghan situation (leaked to the public) that increased the public heat on Obama to come up with more troops for the mission. McChrystal’s actions at the time tiptoed up to the line of undermining the all-important chain of command, but they were also critical to moving the public and the President in support of the war effort. The President eventually gave in, delivering a substantial troop surge, albeit one with a good deal fewer forces than McKiernan or McChrystal had asked for and with a bunch of promises to his own supporters about withdrawal timetables.
Now, months later, McChrystal has plowed over that line, and done so for no such obviously good purposes, and with plenty of notice about what the article would look like. Military men in a theater of war are prone to strong opinions, and it’s hard to say that Vice President Biden and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, among others, haven’t earned Gen. McChrystal’s contempt. But doing so in public is insubordination, plain and simple, and completely inconsistent with our tradition of a chain of command and civilian control of the military. A military man who wants to open both barrels in public against the political leadership has a time-honored way to do that: resign his commission and enter politics. As Harry Truman understood when he fired Douglas MacArthur – then a national hero – at great political cost, a president who doesn’t show the generals who is boss is no longer running anything. That’s bad for civilian-military relations and bad for the president’s and the nation’s credibility, as subordinates learn they can get away with more and allies and enemies wonder who they should listen to. While it speaks well of Gen. McChrystal that the Afghan government is publicly backing him, a president who lets foreign governments, even key allies, have any say in picking his own military officers has lost face he can’t recover.
So, to preserve his own credibility and authority and secure the chain of command, Obama must fire General McChrystal. But doing so isn’t so easy. As Dan Foster notes, the conclusion of the prior dust-up over troop strength showed that much of the public’s trust in Obama was based on the credibility of McChrystal’s recommendations. The champions of Gen. Shinseki will look – rightly – like contemptible hypocrites for sacking a distinguished commander for saying what he thinks. The troops in the field, always prone to regard civilian meddling as foolhardy, may regard the firing of a blunt commander – barely a year after the last commander was sacked after disagreeing with the White House – as a sign that the civilian leadership can’t take some hurt feelings. Obama is also simultaneously cruising for a divisive showdown over ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a change that is sure to be opposed in at least some corners of the military. More significantly, in the short run, McChrystal’s experience and expertise may be hard to replace overnight.
And worst of all for Obama, a credible declare-victory-and-begin-to-draw-down scenario, as was attained by the success of the surge in Iraq by mid-2008, is not on the horizon:

Underlying everything is a far bigger problem. Obama’s strategy of shifting the military’s focus – and 30,000 troops – from Iraq to Afghanistan hasn’t yet yielded a major breakthrough.
The disaster in the Gulf has obscured a steadily increasing drumbeat of bad news and ill omens on Afghanistan. After mixed results in the campaign to re-take Marja, the Pentagon was forced to delay a critical summer offensive in Kandahar, the cradle of the Afghan Taliban insurgency. Earlier this year simmering tensions between the administration and Afghan President Hamid Karzai broke into the open with U.S. officials sharply criticizing Karzai on issues ranging from corruption and nepotism to the fitness of the country’s fighting forces to electoral reform – set against the backdrop of a resurgent Taliban.
That lack of tangible success seems to be splitting official Washington, slowly but inexorably, into hawks and doves camps, with Gates bearing the flag for those who favor a relatively open-ended large-scale commitment of troops with Vice President Joe Biden and others pushing for a far more scaled down approach and Obama himself somewhere in the middle.
People close to Obama say the president recognizes the crisis isn’t just about any one general, but recalibrating policy after a delay of the summer offensive in Kandahar and harmonizing a fractious team of military and civilian advisers.

Whether Obama chooses to start abandoning the war effort or again to face down calls from his own base to do so, he will need the credible backing of trusted military leaders – and shoving out the architect of the current plan (who may well respond by issuing blunter critiques from the outside if he’s pushed out) and bringing in a third commander in Afghanistan in 14 months is no way to win confidence from the public, the military or our allies.
These are tough decisions, and precisely why the presidency is not suited for on-the-job training for people who have never run anything before, or for politicians like President Obama who have built up no basis for trusting them on critical issues of national security. Obama has been walking a very narrow tightrope on Afghanistan, supported largely by the generals. He may be about to fall off.

The Face of Sanctions

News came Monday that the Israeli navy had boarded a flotilla of ships seeking to run Israel’s blockade of Gaza, setting off an incident that ended with the Israelis shooting a number of people on board the ship. The immediate controversy is over what happened on board: the Israelis say they were attacked upon boarding by assailants wielding knives and clubs. Who you believe depends in large part where your sympathies lie in the longstanding struggle between Israel and its neighbors. But at bottom, incidents like Monday’s are the inevitable results of a policy of sanctions and the blockade required to enforce them. And advocates of such policies who claim that they are preferable to more openly aggressive means of dealing with security threats need to come to grips with that fact.

Continue reading The Face of Sanctions

BREAKING: Mullah Omar Captured?

That’s what best-selling novelist Brad Thor is reporting over at Big Government:

Through key intelligence sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I have just learned that reclusive Taliban leader and top Osama bin Laden ally, Mullah Omar has been taken into custody.

If Thor’s sources pan out, this is excellent news, and a moment for real vindication for everyone – from the military brass to Republican leaders and conservative commentators to, yes, President Obama – who argued for pressing on for victory in Afghanistan and not abandoning the region to the Taliban. Of course, I’m guessing that if Mullah Omar has been held for some time now by Pakistani authorities without public disclosure of that fact, he’s probably been under questioning. Without being read any Miranda rights by the Pakistani government, one assumes. But doubtless we’ll learn more about what has happened and when, in due time.

Socialism Plus Racial Resentment Equals Ruin

John Noonan at the Weekly Standard has a long, sad look at the vibrant nation Robert Mugabe inherited and how he ruined Zimbabwe in three decades in office. As Noonan notes, Mugabe’s reign wasn’t always all bad, and the nation still prospered in his first decade in office, but the poison of Maoism and racial resentment was there from the beginning, and grew worse over time, as “the jewel of Africa” fell to a place so ruined that life expectancy dropped nearly in half, unemployment reached 95% and the government was powerless to prevent an outbreak of cholera. One wonders how many of Mugabe’s left-wing champions, like Jimmy Carter, would rather live the life of a black Zimbabwean in 2010 than a black Rhodesian in 1980. (On the other hand, the fate of Zimbabwe gives one a renewed appreciation, by contrast, for Nelson Mandela; Mandela has his own checkered ideological history, and like many national heroes his eventual presidency was not without its stumbles, but he successfully set aside the bitterness of his long imprisonment, steered clear of most of Mugabe’s sins, and left when it was his time to go).

Quick Links 4/20/10

*The Mets have had some questionable decisions already this year. We saw Fernando Tatis try to score on a wild pitch with two outs, the bases loaded, down 3 and David Wright at the plate against a pitcher having trouble throwing strikes. We saw Jerry Manuel pinch run Tatis for Mike Jacobs and then have to use Alex Cora to pinch hit in the same inning. We saw Manuel play for one run on the road with Joe Mather pitching and Jose Reyes on first base, asking Luis Castillo to bunt before Mather had proven the ability to get anybody out. But perhaps none worse than Manuel on Saturday having K-Rod staying warmed up for 12 innings and possibly as many as 125 pitches in the bullpen before coming in tired to blow the save. Let’s hope that doesn’t linger. That’s why you use the closer as soon as you hit extra innings on the road.
*Craig Calcaterra looks at the curious suspension of Ednison Volquez.
*Joe Posnanski’s all-time NBA top 10. His mini-essays on Wilt, Kareem and Jordan are all spot-on, and in Jordan’s case reminded me of his obvious, though smiling, irritation earlier this year when Jay Leno asked if he could still dunk. This, about Wilt, is an excellent point:

You know, if you think about Wilt Chamberlain’s career – it really is staggering to think that he has through the years been labeled as a guy who did not win enough. I mean, Jim Kelly or Dan Marino or Charles Barkley or Barry Bonds – fair or unfair, it is true they didn’t win championships. Chamberlain won TWO. What’s more, he led his team to the Finals four other times. What’s more than that, his teams were beaten by the Celtics six times in those years, and while so many would like to make that a Russell vs. Chamberlain thing, the truth is those Celtics teams had 10 Hall of Famers. TEN HALL OF FAMERS! Two starting lineups of Hall of Famers. Those teams at various times had Havlicek and Sam Jones and Bob Cousy and Bill Sharman and Tommy Heinsohn and K.C. Jones and so on and so on … all in addition to Russell. They also were coached by Red Auerbach and Bill Russell.
To believe that Wilt Chamberlain – with the help of a Hal Greer here or a Tom Meschery or Paul Arizin there, guided by an Alex Hannum or Dolph Schayes – somehow SHOULD have beaten those Celtics teams is to believe that there has never been a more dominant presence in basketball than Wilt.

*Ronald Reagan and James Dean, together on film.

Strangling North Korea

Joshua Stanton looks at the current crisis in Korea and what options South Korea may have short of war, which for a variety of reasons (some strategic, some more obvious) isn’t really the best answer:

President Lee still has options.
First, he can stop feeding the beast – he can cut off South Korean economic aid to the North. For cosmetic purposes, he can offer to resume aid if Kim Jong Il cooperates fully with the investigation and personally apologizes to the sailors’ families (don’t worry; he won’t). Lee can stop importing goods from North Korea and cut this flow of hard currency. The other main conduits of South Korean hard currency for Kim Jong Il include the Kumgang Tourist Project, whose property the North has just begun to confiscate anyway, and the Kaesong Industrial Park, which has fallen victim to North Korean political meddling and clearly won’t ever become a profitable export manufacturing center now. Lee can also order his banks to take a more aggressive approach to enforcing the financial provisions of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874. Politically, he should increase his government’s support for a community of 17,000-plus North Korean defectors who are leading efforts to broadcast independent news back into their homeland, news that seems to have attracted a significant following in North Korea. He can increase the number of defectors his government admits, and do more diplomatically to force China to let would-be defectors in China travel to South Korea safely. He might even permit defectors to establish a North Korean transitional government-in-exile on his country’s soil; after all, with proper education and training, those defectors could be a key part of President Lee’s strategy to re-stabilize post-Kim Jong Il North Korea if, as seems increasingly likely, the Kim Dynasty ceases to exist within the next five years.

Stanton’s piece got me thinking about a broader point. As a general matter, I’m not much convinced by the power of persuasion or the suasion of law in international affairs. And I don’t believe that diplomacy is ever the answer to cause anything to happen; at best, diplomats exist to prevent things from happening, and to work out the endgame once sufficient force has been used or threatened.
War is the use of force, but it’s not the only type, and during the Cold War we eventually got good at finding ways short of open war (including proxy wars as well as other tactics not involving military force) to impose costs on our adversaries for purposes of retaliation and deterrence. One of my ongoing concerns in the two decades since the Cold War is that as a nation, we seem to lack the will or the creativity to find meaningful ways to put pressure on misbehaving states short of bombing or invading them, which naturally means you end up resorting to force in the absence of meaningful alternatives. In some cases, it inevitably has to come to that anyway, but you’d like to keep those to a minimum. Economic sanctions regimes, for example, have proven all but impossible to enforce been riddled with corruption. Unlike the U.S. – and more like the U.S. relationship with Cuba – South Korea may actually have the leverage to use economic muscle in a way that has some real impact on the North without unduly harming its own economy (Stanton thinks so). But in the usual course – even recognizing that the best means of leverage against hostile governments sometimes happen far out of public view – too often we seem to lack the (for lack of a better word) deviousness to make tyrants awake every morning wondering what we will do to them.

Quick Links 4/6/10

*Streiff looks at the disingenuous uproar over a cameraman and reporter affiliated with Reuters who were embedded with insurgents during a firefight in Bagdad in 2007 and got killed in an American helicopter attack on the insurgents
Bill Roggio has more here. I’ve written frequently about the idiocy of the left-wing “chicken hawk” argument – i.e., that only people who have served in the military can advocate for war, while anybody can advocate against it – but on stories like this, that involve not the security of the nation writ large but rather the nitty-gritty of how rules of engagement are put into practice during combat – it really is a very bad idea to have people with no military background jumping to conclusions just from watching a video and adding in a huge presumption that the U.S. military is always in the wrong.
Left-wingers have attempted to spin the belated release of the video as some sort of “cover-up,” but as you can see from the Washington Post report at the time that streiff quotes, the basic facts were never concealed, and if the video – taken out of context – would be propaganda for the enemy, I see no reason why the military ought to have an obligation to publicize it. We don’t have real-time reporting of all military and intelligence activities on C-SPAN (yet) for a reason.
UPDATE: Rusty at the Jawa Report examines the evidence showing, unsurprisingly, that left-wing blogs are flatly misrepresenting the evidence by claiming that the Apache attack at issue did not target armed men.
SECOND UPDATE: The WaPo reporter on hand sees nothing the military could have done differently:

“An operation took place. And it was an operation with merit because it was preceded by soldiers just getting banged up all over the place and they had to do something about it. … The operation was planned thoroughly for days and days and out they went. …
“Here came some guys walking down the street — one with a (rocket) launcher; one, at least one, with an AK(-47). And in the middle of them were two guys, one of whom had something long (a camera) hanging around his neck. And there was no word to the soldiers that journalists were going to be there.

*Rudy Giuliani on the insanity of Obama’s adherence to nuclear freeze movement thinking circa 1983 (which, if you’ll recall, is Obama’s longstanding posture, going all the way back to a 1983 college newspaper piece he wrote in which he viewed the Nuclear Freeze movement as insufficiently ambitious). Here’s Rudy:

“The president doesn’t understand the concept of leverage,” Giuliani continues. “He’s taken away our military option and it looks like he would prevent Israel from using a military option. He also hasn’t gotten Russia or China to agree. With Russia, he should have made them put their cards on the table. Instead, like with the missile shield, he gave up and got nothing for it. He negotiated against himself. That is like reducing the price of your house before you get an offer.”
“Leverage means the other guy has to be afraid of you,” says Giuliani, a former associate attorney general. “I worked for a president, Ronald Reagan, who understood that brilliantly, and that’s how he won the Cold War. You need to appear to be unpredictable. [Reagan’s] State Department understood that you need to create pressure, to create something they’re afraid of. Tell me where Obama has done that.”

Conservatives like to joke that Obama would be tougher on our enemies if he’d pretend they were Republicans, but of course this equally describes one reason why he’s been unsuccessful in getting Republicans to support his domestic initiatives: he’s given the GOP no downside to opposing him. Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer looks at some (but not all; he doesn’t even get to Israel) of Obama’s mistreatment of U.S. allies. An open question is whether Obama thinks we shouldn’t have allies, or just have the wrong ones.
*The Cinderella story of Butler’s basketball team brings back thoughts of Mitch Daniels’ Butler commencement speech in 2009, reflecting among other things on his youth as a Butler hoops fan and “the Butler Way”; it’s one of the best political speeches of recent years, all the moreso because at the time he wasn’t expecting to run for office again (as of now, Daniels appears to be at least thinking of running for President in 2012). Tony Lee at the Atlantic expands on the “Butler Way” theme and how it fits with Daniels.
*Mark Bowden’s profile of General Petraeus is compelling and a must-read.
*Jim Geraghty catches a hilarious example of pop culture/historical ignorance from Katrina vanden Heuvel.

Quick Links 1/8/10

Two lines of the day:
Jonah Goldberg: “the GOP’s troubles over the last decade have a lot to do with the fact that Americans didn’t stop liking what the Republican Party is supposed to deliver. They stopped liking what the GOP actually delivered.” Also: “For too long Republicans confused supporting big business with supporting free markets, when big business is often the biggest impediment to fair competition.”
Steven Green: “A man does not set fire to his penis for a job he expects to botch.”
Finally, this chart from Paul Krugman is interesting and noteworthy (Krugman can occasionally be sane and not wholly dishonest when he sticks to his knitting and writes straight economics rather than partisan politics). I don’t buy entirely his conclusion that “the CRE bubble … gives the lie both to those who blame Fannie/Freddie/Community Reinvestment for the housing bubble, and those who blame predatory lending” – as some of his commenters properly note, the chart reinforces the argument that commercial real estate values are driven at least in part by residential real estate values, even in communities where relatively hard zoning laws make the two types of land non-fungible – but it’s an important point nonetheless to understand that the housing bubble was not solely about housing markets and housing-credit policy.

No B+ For Obama

The New York Daily News under the management of Mort Zuckerman is a fairly reliable weathervane of a particular stripe of moderate, Northeastern Democrat opinion, broadly liberal in inclination but more cold-eyed and hawkish when it comes to crime, national security, and in particular the threat of Islamic extremism to the U.S. and Israel – your basic Ed Koch-type Democrat (this is not an exclusively Jewish phenomenon, although in New York that’s who the leading voices are). Typically, the News gave fawning and totally excessive coverage of every historic move of the historic new historic presidency of Barack Obama during the high watermark of his Administration, from November 2008 through late January 2009; at one point either Obama or his wife was on the front page every day for more than three weeks.

So, it’s significant – in the way moderate-conservative outlets’ turning on George W. Bush between mid-2005 and early 2006 was significant – that the News today has a blisteringly harsh assessment of Obama’s sluggish public response to the attempted destruction of a U.S.-bound flight by a fanatic wearing bomb-laden underwear apparently designed by Al Qaeda bomb-makers in Yemen, especially given the revelation that U.S. intelligence had been warned by the Nigerian bomb-wearer’s father that he was in cahoots with Islamist extremists. The News’ assessment, which was featured with the front page headline “Get a Grip”:

The moment demanded inspiring, decisive presidential leadership.
America waited four days for a glimmer.
President Obama’s initial response Monday was too long in coming, too cool in delivery and too removed from the extreme gravity of the plot….

Before his first remarks on Monday, Obama had left a vacuum, and into that 76-hour empty space rushed Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, whose ineptitude made a mockery of her position and threw millions of fliers into continuing states of confusion.
What the public was left with was a never-to-be-repeated case study in crisis mismanagement. It’s time to get a grip, Mr. President.

Napolitano’s “the system worked” comment is perhaps the perfect symbol of this tone-deaf response, given that this particular attack was essentially thwarted by the passengers, not by the government. This is, of course, in contrast to how swift and vivid Obama’s statements can be when he wants to make partisan hay from the news, as with his same-day statement declaring himself “shocked and outraged” at the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller. The News’ assessment of the substance of Obama’s response is no cheerier:

Obama’s description of Abdulmutallab as an “isolated extremist” was remarkable and disturbing. This radicalized young Nigerian is nothing of the sort. He operated, in fact, as an Al Qaeda-recruited, Al Qaeda-supplied, Al Qaeda-directed foot soldier – as, to put it directly, an enemy combatant, and not as the criminal “suspect” of Obama’s description.
In similarly distant fashion, the President ordered up a “review” of how Abdulmutallab smuggled explosives onto the jet and a “review” of how he slipped through the government’s various terror watch lists despite signals of clear and present danger.

The Telegraph has a more detailed rundown of how the intelligence on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab didn’t prevent him from boarding the plane with a bomb in his pants, and how Obama’s response continues a disturbing pattern:

There has been a pattern developing with the Obama administration trying to minimise terrorist attacks. We saw it with Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad, a Muslim convert who murdered a US Army recruit in Little Rock, Arkansas in June. We saw it with Major Nidal Malik Hassan, a Muslim with Palestinian roots who slaughtered 13 at Fort Hood, Texas last month. In both cases, there were Yemen connections. Obama began to take the same approach with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

As the News notes, the security problems that led to this attack include laxity at the TSA and a too-easy hand in releasing Gitmo detainees (such as the Yemeni bomb-makers who were released to a Saudi “art therapy” program), both of which have roots in the Bush Administration’s periodic capitulations to political correctness and (in the TSA’s case) the disastrous “leadership” of Norman Mineta. But the News also notes that Obama can’t well avoid responsibility for Bush policies he inherited and chose to expand, rather than repair. He’s particularly put on the spot by liberal California Democrat Dianne Feinstein’s call for a halt to releases of further GTMO detainees to Yemen.
There will be no B+ for this effort.

Teddy Roosevelt on the Nobel Peace Prize and the Use of Force

Our second history lesson of the day: on the occasion of Barack Obama’s acceptance of the honor, it is worth looking back to a little history. Theodore Roosevelt, the first sitting President awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, did not attend the ceremony, but sent a telegram. But TR gave a Nobel lecture in 1910 – two years after leaving office, four years after winning the prize for mediating the end of the Russo-Japanese War, and four years before the world was plunged into The Great War – and his observations on peace are worth recalling, even as he was (at the time) optimistic about the possibilities for then-nascent international institutions:

In any community of any size the authority of the courts rests upon actual or potential force: on the existence of a police, or on the knowledge that the able-bodied men of the country are both ready and willing to see that the decrees of judicial and legislative bodies are put into effect. In new and wild communities where there is violence, an honest man must protect himself; and until other means of securing his safety are devised, it is both foolish and wicked to persuade him to surrender his arms while the men who are dangerous to the community retain theirs. He should not renounce the right to protect himself by his own efforts until the community is so organized that it can effectively relieve the individual of the duty of putting down violence. So it is with nations. Each nation must keep well prepared to defend itself until the establishment of some form of international police power, competent and willing to prevent violence as between nations. As things are now, such power to command peace throughout the world could best be assured by some combination between those great nations which sincerely desire peace and have no thought themselves of committing aggressions.

And so it is today; sometimes those combinations act through international institutions like the UN, sometimes they don’t – and the day is not on the horizon when we could trust such institutions with police powers of their own. Those of us who love peace, therefore, must continue to heed Roosevelt’s caution at how it is maintained.

Continue reading Teddy Roosevelt on the Nobel Peace Prize and the Use of Force

Rumsfeld to Obama: What Troop Requests?

One line in President Obama’s orgy of blame-Bush-for-everything speech last night has prompted former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, who managed the Afghan war for five years, to call for the President to back up his assertions. Secretary Rumsfeld’s statement, issued in a press release this morning, called for an investigation of a certain 21 words in Obama’s speech:

“In his speech to the nation last night, President Obama claimed that ‘Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive.’ Such a bald misstatement, at least as it pertains to the period I served as Secretary of Defense, deserves a response.”
“I am not aware of a single request of that nature between 2001 and 2006. If any such requests occurred, ‘repeated’ or not, the White House should promptly make them public. The President’s assertion does a disservice to the truth and, in particular, to the thousands of men and women in uniform who have fought, served and sacrificed in Afghanistan.”
“In the interest of better understanding the President’s announcement last night, I suggest that the Congress review the President’s assertion in the forthcoming debate and determine exactly what requests were made, who made them, and where and why in the chain of command they were denied.”

The Administration responded by backing away:

Robert Gibbs cheerfully responded to Donald Rumsfeld’s denial that he’d denied troops to Afghanistan with, first, a clarification that Obama had been talking about the post-Rumsfeld era of 2008.
…”I will let Secretary Rumsfeld explain” whether the war in Afghanistan “was sufficiently resourced during his tenure” … and how he thinks “history will judge whether they were or were not sufficient,” Gibbs said.
Gibbs quipped: “You go to war with the secretary of Defense that you have.”

Or, in the case of the Obama Administration, you go to war with the very same secretary of Defense – Robert Gates, the man who held the job in 2008 – that you just threw under the Obamabus. If you recall, Gates himself had testified in November 2008 (after the election) that he expected an additional 30,000 troops to be sent, but the incoming Administration put off its follow-through on that promise until March, and cut Gates’ proposal nearly in half.
21 words don’t say what they used to, do they?
Gibbs’ back-and-forth with Jake Tapper below the fold.

Continue reading Rumsfeld to Obama: What Troop Requests?

Everyone Is A Critic

Want an illustration of problems faced by putting terrorists on trial that don’t arise in military commissions or in ordinary criminal prosecutions? Try this:

A legal team is going to New York to prevent the use of evidence provided by Germany in seeking a death penalty. Berlin wants to ensure that promises made by the US are kept if the suspects are found guilty.
A team of observers from the German government is going to New York to oversee the trial of five suspects accused of orchestrating the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the news magazine Der Spiegel reported on Saturday.
The federal trial of the suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants was announced on November 13 by the US Justice Department. The government also asserted that it intends to seek the death penalty if the accused are found guilty.
Germany, which does not have a death penalty, provided evidence for the trial on the condition that it could not be used to support a death sentence. Several members of the al Qaeda cell that planned and executed the attacks of September 11 were previously based in the northern German city of Hamburg.
“In this case we will observe very closely that the given assurances are kept,” Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said.

Now, we can certainly tell the Germans to mind their own damn business, but since the entire point of this exercise is good PR with the “international community,” that’s not going to advance the purpose of the trial.

Quick Links 11/20/09

*Lots of interesting stuff out there on Sarah Palin and her book tour. the Daily Beast looks at how Palin’s book and tour are a one-woman economic stimulus package. Obama’s organization wants a part of that action too: Organizing for America says Palin’s book tour is “dangerous,” so please give them $5. As liberal writer Ezra Klein notes of the Palin coverage:

Liberal sites need traffic just like conservative sites, and the mainstream media needs traffic more than both. And Palin draws traffic. This is actually pretty good revenge for a politician who hates the media. The press had a good time showing Palin to be a superficial creature who relied more on style than on substance, and in getting the media to drop everything and focus on her book tour, she’s proving that they’re much the same.

Amazingly, two positive Palin pieces at Salon, and neither of them written by Camille Paglia: a favorable review of her book and a look at what she means and why she’s not going away as a public figure.
And witness the McCain campaign’s crack rapid-response team in action: more than a year after the election, the NY Times finally gets to talk to the stylist who bought the Palin family’s clothes, and admits that Palin had nothing to do with the money that was spent.
*Mitt Romney takes apart how Obama’s inexperience has led to his failure to set clear priorities and resulting lack of focus on the war and the economy while he pursues as-yet-unfinished health care and cap and trade bills and failed efforts to salvage the campaigns of Jon Corzine and Creigh Deeds. It’s a mark of how inexperienced and incompetent Obama is that he can be lectured credibly on these points by a 1-term governor like Romney and a half-term governor like Palin. Michael Gerson looks in more detail at the mess that is Obama’s decision-making process in Afghanistan.
*Another glorious victory for the stimulus:

The Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, after receiving about $1.3 million in funding from The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, reported creating or saving 935 jobs in their Head Start preschool program that only employs 508 people.

*Byron York looks at why Eric Holder is refusing to disclose how many Justice Department lawyers have previously represented the other side in the war.
*Patterico, as usual, is a man not to tangle with, and he remorselessly dismantles an LA Times columnist over the latest Breitbart ACORN videos. It’s a facepalm with egg and crow!
*Jonathan Karl notices a $100 million payoff to Louisiana in the Senate healthcare bill to buy Mary Landrieu’s vote. John Conyers, in griping about Obama’s posture on the House bill, speaks about “the Barack Obama that I first met, who was an ardent single-payer enthusiast himself.”
*Michael Rosen looks at Al Franken’s so-called “anti-rape” bill that would preclude arbitration of sexual harrassment and various negligence-based employment claims. As Rosen notes, given that the law already bars arbitration of claims arising from rape, whereas the things it would actually change are much less dramatic, it is flatly false to describe opposition to the bill as being “pro-rape” – but then, that’s pretty much Franken’s M.O.

Dear Fred Thompson: Let’s Not Do This Again

I have a lot of respect for Fred Thompson, and in this particular case I think his point is precisely correct on the merits, but there are just some things that opponents of the President shouldn’t say during wartime, and maybe it’s just bad phrasing or just being provocative, but this is one of them:

Continue reading Dear Fred Thompson: Let’s Not Do This Again

Gee, I Had Not Thought of That

Lindsey Graham exposes the extent to which Attorney General Holder simply doesn’t have a well-thought-out plan for how to handle interrogations of captured enemy combatants in a way that makes a rational distinction between those who should be given Miranda and other warnings in preparation for civilian prosecution, and those who should not. It’s impossible for anybody involved in battlefield detentions to watch this video and come away with any sort of guidance from the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. As a number of people have pointed out, whatever this is, it isn’t the rule of law.

UPDATE: And Leahy doesn’t even think there’s any value in interrogating bin Laden.

The Governor Dissents

Add New York Governor David Paterson – surely, no right-winger – to the list of critics of trying Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in Manhattan, and he adds an additional concern, that the expense and additional security will interfere with the endlessly-delayed plans to rebuild on the Ground Zero site:

“This is not a decision that I would have made. I think terrorism isn’t just attack, it’s anxiety and I think you feel the anxiety and frustration of New Yorkers who took the bullet for the rest of the country,” he said.
Paterson’s comments break with Democrats, who generally support the President’s decision.
“Our country was attacked on its own soil on September 11, 2001 and New York was very much the epicenter of that attack. Over 2,700 lives were lost,” he said. “It’s very painful. We’re still having trouble getting over it. We still have been unable to rebuild that site and having those terrorists so close to the attack is gonna be an encumbrance on all New Yorkers.”

H/T James Taranto, who wonders why we’re just hearing all this now if the White House warned Paterson six months ago.

The Public’s Not Buying The Trial

Here in New York, the Obama Administration’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other Al Qaeda terrorists in the civilian justice system in downtown Manhattan has garnered plenty of well-earned criticism, including from New York’s leading anti-terrorism experts like Rudy Giuliani, Michael Mukasey (who handled the blind sheikh trial as a district judge before becoming President Bush’s third Attorney General) and Andrew McCarthy (who was one of the prosecutors), and Long Island Congressman Peter King. And not just from the Right; even arch-liberals like Daily News sportswriter Mike Lupica have weighed in against the decision. Now the people are being heard from, and while the polls as usual show some diversity of opinion, the public is deeply skeptical of this enterprise even before it gets underway, let alone after what promises to be many months of grandstanding by the terrorists, gridlock in lower Manhattan, possible setbacks in the prosecution and the hemmhoraging of scarce resources on the trial(s) (as my retired-NYPD dad put it: “there’s going to be plenty of overtime for the cops.”).
The critics’ bases for opposing a trial are numerous, and several of them are reviewed by Erick here. And the polls now show those criticisms are shared by a majority of the nation’s voters and a significant minority even in liberal New York City, with the rest uncertain.
To quickly summarize the case against the trials:

Continue reading The Public’s Not Buying The Trial

The Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Lower Manhattan Reunion Tour

Pardon me if I am seeing red this morning:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and four others accused in the attacks will be put on criminal trial in New York, Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to announce later Friday.

WHAT IN THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?
So, Barack Obama will be staging his own New York production of Chicago, with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as Roxy Hart (“You had it coming, you had it coming, you only have yourselves to blame….” ). We will be treated to months upon months of front page headlines giving a platform to this lunatic war criminal. The courthouses and City office buildings in lower Manhattan (City Hall, the state courts, the immigration offices, the Court of International Trade, the US Attorney’s Office, the DA’s office, and the main city office building that does marriage licenses and the like are all within about a two-block radius of the federal courthouses and the Metropolitan Correctional Center) will be snarled with massive security, as if lower Manhattan needs more traffic and more armed men. We’ll have to have pretrial hearings on the inevitable countless motions about how KSM was apprehended and the evidence against him collected, undoubtedly to the detriment of vital sources of intelligence, like when we lost the ability to track Osama bin Laden by cellphone after our tracing of his calls was revealed by a prosecution under the DOJ Criminal Division then headed by…Eric Holder. And that’s even before he starts in on the sob stories about being waterboarded. I’m not seriously concerned that KSM stands any chance of being acquitted, but a hung jury? It only takes one person with extreme political or religious views, one juror who just can’t abide the death penalty (even assuming Obama’s DOJ pursues it). Just imagine the controversy, if there are Muslims in the jury pool, over what questions prosecutors are permitted to ask them and whether they can be challenged. And of course, it sends the message to our enemies that there’s nothing you can do to us that will get you sent through a process rougher than the one we used on Michael Vick or Martha Stewart.
I know I have spoken and written many rough things about Obama, but as Michael Moore would say, most New Yorkers voted for the man – why is he doing this to us?
It’s impossible, really, to caricature this White House; even Josiah Bartlett didn’t run through this many liberal stereotypes in his first season. Obama needs new writers. Blow up the World Trade Center and kill 3,000 Americans? Jail! Don’t buy health insurance? Jail! Win the Nobel Prize for doing jack squat. Travel to Copenhagen to beg and grovel unsuccessfully for the Olympics, and pledge to go visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but blow off traveling to Berlin to commemorate the victory of freedom over Communism (then give a tepid speech on the subject that refuses to acknowledge Ronald Reagan). Commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland by unilaterally abandoning missile defense installations in Poland. Insult and disdain one faithful ally after another – Britain, India, Israel, Poland, Colombia, you name it – and cozy up to our enemies, with nothing to show for it – nothing to show for anything he’s done in foreign affairs. All but ignore democratic protests in Iran while supporting an illegal effort by Honduras’ president to stay on beyond the end of his term. Suddenly complain about corruption and electoral fraud in Afghanistan, while seeking the favor of Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadenijad and Vladimir Putin – heck, Obama endorsed half a dozen people in Chicago more corrupt than Hamid Karzai. On and on and on we go, with President Apology constantly straining to run down his country’s record and talk up the propagandized view of history of its enemies. He’s taken more time to “evaluate” General McChrystal’s recommendations about Afghan policy than it took George W. Bush to invade Afghanistan and capture Kabul after September 11. It would be funny if it wasn’t tragically stupid and bound to get people killed. There is no mistake of our past that Obama is unwilling to remake.
If there’s an upside to all this, after months of watching KSM up close, even liberal New Yorkers may be ready to give Dick Cheney a medal.

Don’t Ask

Ace looks at one of the obvious lessons from the Fort Hood massacre. Now, there are inevitably a few people calling for a blanket ban on Muslims in the military (indeed, Dr. Hasan was one of them), and for a variety of reasons that should be obvious, that’s going too far. The harder question is, should the military be acting more aggressively to root out servicemembers with jihadist sympathies before this sort of thing recurs, and what steps it should be taking to conduct such investigations.
But the easy question is what should be done when the evidence is open and obvious that a member of the military sympathizes with the nation’s sworn enemies rather than his own country. That’s exactly what was present here, and a climate of politically correct fear seems to have inhibited anybody from doing anything about it.

A Man of Indeterminate Religion

I’ll hopefully have more at another juncture on the Fort Hood shootings and what they do and don’t mean. But for now, it’s enough to observe some of the more absurd examples of media efforts to avoid discussing not only the shooter’s Muslim religion but – of greater significance when the two are taken together – the extensive record of red flags regarding his jihadist and anti-American, anti-US military sympathies. David Forsmark looks at the typically ludicrous coverage ladled out by Keith Olbermann and others at MSNBC, while Patterico catches the LA Times trying to conceal its initial effort at hiding the facts from its readers.
Meanwhile, via Allahpundit, note efforts like this one from BradBlog, and this segment on the Rachel Maddow show, to blame conservatives for a death of a federal worker in Kentucky that authorities now believe was a suicide. Note how Maddow, despite obviously not having all the facts, immediately speculated that this was “a crime related to anti-government sentiment” and trying to draw inferences from the federal government’s behavior to support that argument.

Absurdity

I’m so accustomed to interviews with German magazine Der Spiegel producing anti-American quotes from American politicians and entertainers that it’s a breath of fresh air to read this marvelous interview with Charles Krauthammer, especially at the obviously staggered reaction of the interviewer. The parts dealing with Obama’s foreign policy are the best parts of the interview.
I’m not sure, however, I quite agree with this:

The analogy I give is that in America we play the game between the 40-yard lines, in Europe you go all the way from goal line to goal line. You have communist parties, you have fascist parties, we don’t have that, we have very centrist parties.

That’s true to some extent, especially as far as comparing the governing center of each of the two U.S. parties to the overall European landscape. But the governing coalitions in European politics differ far less from each other than the Democrats and the Republicans do. Margaret Thatcher notwithstanding, Reaganite conservatives are a rarity in Europe, where the conservatives are largely socialist and the fascists are (as fascists generally are) even more socialist. That remains true even today, as the prevailing trend in many European countries is to the right of the current leadership in the U.S.
I love that Krauthammer mentions perhaps my favorite elected Republican, Paul Ryan, as a presidential candidate, but realistically Ryan’s still young, and if it’s ever possible to win the White House from Congress (Obama proved that perhaps the only way a Senator gets elected is by running against another Senator who’s been in the Senate longer), 2012 doesn’t look like that year.
Also, Krauthammer’s analogy of Bush to Truman, while by no means original, is better-argued than I’ve generally seen it:

I think Bush actually handled the Iraq War better than Truman handled the Korean War. For one thing, the number of losses is about one-tenth. Secondly, he made the right decision with the surge. Thirdly, if Iraq turns out well, meaning becomes a country fairly self-sufficient and fairly friendly to the West, it will have a more important effect on the West than having a non-communist South Korea. The Middle East is strategically a far more important region.
Bush’s worst mistake was the conduct of the Iraq war in the middle years — 2004-2006 — and the attempt to win on the cheap, with a light footprint.
On the other hand, I think he did exactly the right thing after 9/11. Look at the Patriot Act, which revolutionized how we deal with domestic terrorism, passed within six weeks of 9/11 in the fury of the moment. Testimony to how well Bush got it right is that Democrats, who now control Congress and had been highly critical of it, are now after eight years reauthorizing it with almost no significant changes.
Afghanistan is more problematic. Our success in overthrowing the Taliban in 100 days was remarkable. It’s one of the great military achievements of all time. On the other hand, holding Afghanistan is a lot harder than taking it, and to this day we are not sure how to do it. But the initial success in 2001-2002 did decimate and scatter al-Qaida. It is no accident that we have not suffered a second attack — something no one who lived in Washington on Sept. 11 thought possible.
I’m sure he will be rehabilitated in the long term.
Clare Booth Luce once said that every president is remembered for one thing, and that’s what Bush will be remembered for. He kept us safe.

Jim Moran and the “Taliban”

Arlington/Alexandria Democrat Jim Moran is always a reliable source of lunacy and foolishness; examples include blaming the Iraq War on Jews (Moran has an exhaustive rap sheet of anti-Semitism) and pushing to get Guantanamo detainees tried in his district over the objections of local Democrats.
Monday, at a Creigh Deeds rally, Moran was on hand to prove that there is no cause so lost that he won’t contribute some crazy to it:

U.S. Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) likened the Republican ticket in Virginia this year to Afghanistan’s radical Taliban movement in comments broadcast Sunday by WAMU radio.
At a get-out-the-vote rally in Fairfax County, Moran said: “I mean, if the Republicans were running in Afghanistan, they’d be running on the Taliban ticket as far as I can see.”

Of course, when it comes to fighting the actual Taliban, Moran’s position is a lot more, er, nuanced; it turns out that his view of the US military’s presence in Afghanistan is closer to the Taliban’s than to the GOP’s:

Jim Moran, a Democratic member of the US congress, said “the majority of Democrats will continue to support President Obama, but that’s not to say we’re going to continue on the course in which we’re going”.
“Right now we need a better strategy … It is clear that Afghanistan does not lend itself to a military victory, it’s about economic development, it’s about building civil society. The military presence clearly is a problem in itself,” he said.
Still, he added that while Pelosi was right in saying there was “no appetite” for sending more US troops to Afghanistan, “there’s no appetite for taking cod liver oil but sometimes you have a situation where you just have to grimace and swallow it”.

When Bob McDonnell starts blasting the perfidious influence of the Jews, bemoaning the U.S. overthrow of Saddam and complaining that the US military presence in Afghanistan is a “problem,” maybe it will be time to consider comparing him to the Taliban. In the meantime, maybe Jim Moran should stick to pushing around women and children and leave the Taliban-hunting business to people who are serious about it.

The Taliban Deal-Breaker

The major decision the Obama Administration continues to procrastinate is whether to continue the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Victory in Afghanistan was, as you will recall, one of Obama’s main campaign themes – one he used to convince people that he wasn’t the dyed-in-the-tie-dyes peacenik his left-wing record, background and positions on other issues suggested. Under President Bush, America’s war aims in Afghanistan were fairly straightforward:
1. Drive the Taliban from power.
2. Destroy Al Qaeda’s training and operations bases in the country, while killing or capturing as many of their personnel as possible.
3. Replace the Taliban with a government that was less repressive, viewed as legitimate by the Afghan people, and would not cooperate with Al Qaeda – a step that inherently involved preventing the revival of the Taliban itself, given its Islamist ideology and thorough integration with Al Qaeda.
Step One was accomplished swiftly in the fall of 2001, and Step Two proceeded apace at the same time; Al Qaeda’s leadership was never wholly destroyed (its very top men appear to have fled to the Waziristan region of Pakistan), nor completely routed from the country, but its bases were destroyed and its ability to project power from Afghanistan to outside countries was essentially crippled.
Step Three was always the diciest as a long-term proposition; as I wrote in early 2003:

Long-term, we would like to establish a secure government in Afghanistan that will consolidate the victory over theocracy and prevent re-establishment of havens for terror. But if we fail in that aim, as we still may, the war will no more be a failure than it is a failure to weed your garden in spring and, the following year, discover new weeds.

We were never going to create an ideal liberal democracy in Afghanistan, given its combination of (among other things) tribal warlord culture, illiteracy and poverty, but without going into the whole 8-year blow-by-blow, the Karzai government has by and large held together in one form or another for 8 years as a mostly-willing ally against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Recently, however, especially since Al Qaeda’s activities in Iraq have been winding down, the Taliban has been gaining more of a foothold, requiring the U.S. to face a choice: step up its own presence, or stand down and allow the Taliban to take its best shot at regaining power.
Now, Obama is putting up trial balloons about giving up on the whole project and accepting the Taliban returning to power as a fait accompli before it has even become one (passively allowing conditions on the ground to worsen and then accept the results as inevitable is Obama’s go-to foreign policy move). But Allahpundit asks one crucial question we need to put to the Taliban to test whether or not it’s completely insane to do this:

Ask them to tell us where Osama, Zawahiri, Abu Yahya al-Libi, and the rest of the gang are hiding; if Omar and the Quetta Shura don’t have that information instantly available, they should be able to get it pretty quickly. Then they pass it to the Pakistanis and the Pakistanis pass it to us and the rest is left to the generals and drone operators….And if the Taliban refuses his demand, whether for reasons of jihadist loyalty or Pashtun hospitality, then there’s your proof that they can never, ever be trusted not to host AQ if we leave them alone in Afghanistan.

We know the answer to that, and presumably so does President Obama. Bill Roggio explains at length why this would never happen, detailing the loyalties and operational integration of Al Qaeda with the Taliban and noting the obvious fact that a U.S. bent on leaving Afghanistan has a lot less leverage than one bent on entering it:

Mullah Omar would not agree to turn over bin Laden [in September 2001] when he was faced with the prospect of imminent annihilation. Surely Omar will not part ways with the terror master now that his prospects for success are greater than they have been in years.

Now, I’m not 100% opposed in theory to allowing bad actors to become parts of the political process if necessary to end a civil war, for example. But this is not a civil war, as Roggio details (really, you need to read his whole strategic overview). It is – and here is the fundamental way in which Right and Left disagree on this – a zero-sum ideological battle in which a U.S. defeat at the hands of Islamist tyrants cannot possibly be viewed as anything but a catastrophic setback. And acceptance of a resurgent Taliban after 8 years of making war to prevent just that would be understood universally as a defeat. Roggio details how Al Qaeda, as it did in Iraq, plays the sort of role in the Afghan war that the Soviet Union did in Vietnam, treating the locals as its proxies in an effort to demonstrate the superiority of its ideological model over that of the U.S., while providing logistical and other support. Any political accomodation that gives state power to an ongoing Al Qaeda proxy and ideological soulmate is a direct threat to U.S. national security, and needs to be treated as such.
The Left, having largely abandoned its long-held pretense of supporting the war against the Taliban, is busy conjuring up excuses for why victory can’t be an option. Some of these are longstanding (Afghanistan is poor and mountainous and disorganized), some more recently stressed (the Karzai government is corrupt, the recent election tainted by fraud – two interesting choices of criticism from supporters of a Chicago machine Democrat to run our own government), but if those weren’t the excuses, there would be others. There are always others. The Left palpably ached for another Vietnam in Iraq, and despite a long, bloody and bitter war at great domestic political cost to the Right, in the end it didn’t get one – instead of a repeat of the fall of Saigon at the hands of the jihad, an elected and relatively pro-American government still stands in Baghdad, and in one form or another looks likely to endure, even if its form and posture may change as the years go by. The same script is being rolled out in Afghanistan; it will be up to this White House to resist it even as it comes from Obama’s own ideological soulmates.
Afghanistan is not Obama’s war; it is America’s, and those of us on the Right want it to succeed and will, by and large, support its aggressive prosecution under a Democratic president. But the corollary is that just as it’s not his war alone to support, it’s not his alone to abandon. Obama promised to see this fight through to the end. The Taliban won’t do the things they’d need to do to switch sides; they remain committed to defeating us, and only America can stop them. Will Obama keep his promise? Or will he back down from Al Qaeda’s unrepentant ally and protector, and treat them as just more guys from the neighborhood?

Because Kellogg and Briand Were Not Available

Today’s announcement that Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – having been nominated a grand total of 12 days into his presidency – officially places Obama and the Nobel Committee alike beyond parody. There’s no stereotype of liberals they won’t embody. Could you possibly come up with a storyline that more perfectly captures the whole idea of Obama – all talk and promises and of course self-congratulation, and nothing to show for it? At least they haven’t (yet) renamed the prize after him, but I assume that future winners will be given a framed commemorative picture on black velvet of a shirtless Obama astride a unicorn. This is the most self-evidently ridiculous award since Rafael Palmeiro winning Gold Glove for season when he played only 28 games in the field. The ESPYs are now a more prestigious award than the Nobel Peace Prize.
I can’t top Benjamin Kerstein’s thoroughgoing vivisection of what this all says about Obama, but let me add a few thoughts of my own.
First, the contrast to last week’s Olympic snub is telling. The Olympics would be something of concrete value to the country – small, localized, and dubious value, but at least Obama could have claimed to have brought home the bacon for someone other than himself. That, he couldn’t do. But a cash prize payable personally to Obama, and a bunch of gassy generalities about “hope”? Sure thing! Even the international organizations seem to have figured out what Obama deserves and how to placate him when he gets nothing for his country.
Second, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in his first year in office, like promising to roll back the seas, pledging a net reduction in federal spending, promising no tax hikes for 95% of the American public, and circulating those infamous graphs showing the unemployment rate if the stimulus package was passed (hint: it’s much higher now than Obama’s people said it would be without the stimulus) sets an awfully high bar that Obama is bound to regret setting, for he will inevitably and certainly fall short of it.
Third, even on the Left’s own terms, it’s hard to see what exactly Obama has produced. The war in Iraq has been winding down since before he was elected, but it’s not over. The war in Afghanistan has gotten worse, and the U.S. presence there has escalated. Obama might decide to turn tail anyday now – earlier this week he gave a speech on terrorism that referenced Al Qaeda and multiple locations around the world but pointedly omitted mention of the Taliban or Afghanistan – but as of today, the anti-war movement has zilch to show there either. He hasn’t brought an end to rendition, electronic surveillance or indefinite detention, or closed Guantanamo – simply making our policies in those areas more opaque and less effective doesn’t count. He hasn’t produced anything concrete on “climate change.” The only concessions he’s won have been from the United States, such as dropping missile defense in Eastern Europe in exchange for an unspecified “hey buddy, I owe you one” from Vladimir Putin. Even the statements of the Nobel Committee were basically an affirmation that he was being given it as a form of social promotion: we hope if we give you the prize, it’ll encourage you to get more done.
Unsurprisingly, the most sycophantic reaction comes from Andrew Sullivan. Even Sullivan has to admit the award is “premature,” but then goes on to gush that “this is thoroughly deserved” and

Americans … haven’t fully absorbed the turn-around in the world’s view of America that Obama and the American people have accomplished.

As usual with such statements, Sullivan bypasses evidence and declines to specify who he means by “the world” – Putin? Hugo Chavez? Al Qaeda? The man on the street in Beijing, who has no political voice? – or what sort of results one would expect to see, if in fact “the world” was more favorably disposed towards the United States. Sullivan then ejaculates:

I hope more see both the peaceful intentions and the steely resolve of this man to persevere.

I’m at a loss to think of even a fictional, hypothetical example of Obama displaying “steely resolve,” but whatever gets you through the night, I guess.

This president has done a huge amount to bring race relations in this country to a different place…[the “far right”] know he threatens their politics of division and rule.

Leaving aside what any of that has to do with world peace (Bishop Tutu, he’s not), what place would that be? Henry Louis Gates certainly didn’t seem to think so. I doubt very much that we’re going to see anybody arguing from the Left that any issue of race relations has improved sufficiently under Obama so as to justify an end to race-conscious government policies or policies premised upon arguments about racial inequality. I can predict with 100% confidence that the Left will continue to spend far more time talking about race throughout Obama’s presidency than the Right. All that has changed is the benefit to Obama himself of Obama getting elected.

He has also directly addressed the Muslim world, telling some hard truths, and played a small role in evoking a similar movement of hope and change in Iran, and finally told the Israelis to stop cutting their nose off to spite their face.

One could spend weeks unpacking the untruths in this single sentence, a masterpiece of dishonesty and self-deception for which I can only tip my cap to Sullivan. The Cairo speech was, as I have previously discussed, full of at best half-truths and appalling moral equivalencies, Obama’s response on Iran was far later and more muted than similar statements on Iranian liberty by his predecessor (and the Iran crisis undercut the whole point of his Cairo speech)…but yes, I’ll give him “credit” for disagreeing with the Israeli people and their elected leaders as to matters of Israeli national security. Everybody loves to have Obama lecture them on how he knows best. Oh, and I guess the Israelis aren’t part of “the world.”

[W]e were facing a spiral of conflict that, unchecked, could have taken the world to the abyss. I see this prize as an endorsement of his extraordinary reorientation of world politics, and as an encouragement to see it through….[T]his is an attempt to tell us: look up for a moment, see how far we’ve come in pivoting away from global conflict, and give this man a break for his efforts and the massive burden he now bears.
And, in the darkness that still threatens, know hope.

This is hyperbole not on stilts but aloft in a zeppelin, and one can only extend best wishes that Sullivan survives the altitude. And as usual with Obama, it measures his accomplishments entirely by positing an unknowable “but for” world of unimaginable horror, then simply assuming that everything that didn’t happen is a positive accomplishment. He’s being lauded here for peace “created or saved,” the alternative to which is unprovable – the very definition of a faith-based standard of accomplishment. And even on these grounds, Sullivan can’t begin to specify what concrete thing Obama has done or will do, since that would open him to having to move his goalposts when reality intrudes in his castles in the air.
Today, we saw the real fruition of Barack Obama’s international ambitions. He delivered the one thing he’s really good at: accolades and money for Barack Obama.

Nolympics

So, as you’ve probably seen, Chicago was eliminated in the first round of bidding for the 2016 Summer Olympics, despite (I assume despite) President Obama’s personal lobbying for the Games.
Now, as a New Yorker, I really would not want the Olympics anywhere near my city, and the Olympics don’t exactly have a grand history of making money for the host city (ask Montreal) or necessarily good press (ask Munich), but I take at face value for the moment that Chicagoans really wanted this one and felt it would be good for the city. Certainly great effort and expense was put into the bid, and many hopes seemed to be riding on it.
I’d questioned Obama’s priorities in making the trip, but now he has a much bigger problem. It’s one thing for the President to make a phone call or two to lend a subtle hand to this sort of effort; that would have been fine with me. But by the President and First Lady both making personal appearances and elevating this to the top news story of the day and a test of personal and national prestige, Obama stood a significant chance of being humiliated, and doing so for what is hard to describe as a critical national interest. Most of us on the Right assumed, whatever we thought of the trip, that Obama would never be fool enough to make it if he didn’t already have deals done to get this in the bag for Chicago. Apparently, we overestimated him.
This is why you don’t publicly stake your prestige on something that’s not (1) hugely important (2) a done deal or (3) ideally, both. All presidents suffer defeats and embarrassments, but you generally don’t walk right into one on an issue of purely local importance to your home city. Obama’s and the nation’s standing in the world can’t help but be chipped away by this; the next time he goes jetting off to a summit or some other international event, people won’t be so quick to assume that he has all figured out in advance how he’s going to get what he wants. That aura, that mystique is a thing of value that the President is supposed to husband carefully for when the nation really needs it. Bush was impotent by the end of his presidency because he’d burned that up, but he had it for the better part of five years. Obama’s losing it already.
What a waste.

You, Sir, Are No Gordon Brown

Noted right-winger David Corn, on the White House’s refusal to match the British commitment on Afghanistan:

It was a simple query: Would Obama also say that the United States will hang tough until the job is done? The press secretary, though, fended it off. And later in the briefing, he commented, “We cannot stay there forever.” That is not the Rasmussen position. That means the leaders of the two key forces in Afghanistan cannot agree on their respective dedication to the mission.

Read the whole thing.
H/T Allahpundit