Denny Pelosi
Gas prices rise, and Republicans panic.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Few things are less becoming in a political party than desperation, as Republicans are now demonstrating as they panic over rising oil and gas prices. If blaming private industry for Congress's own energy mistakes is the best the GOP can do, no wonder its voters may sit out the November election.

Oil prices hit $75 a barrel last week, while gas has reached a national average of about $2.85 a gallon. The Republican response has been to put on Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi fright wigs and shout about corporate greed and market manipulation. House Speaker Denny Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist fired off a letter to President Bush yesterday demanding the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department investigate "price fixing" and "gouging." Senator Arlen Specter wants to go further and impose stricter "antitrust" laws for oil companies, as well as a "windfall profits" tax. Mr. Hastert also delighted the class warriors in the press corps by lambasting recently retired Exxon CEO Lee Raymond's pay "unconscionable."

There's been unconscionable behavior all right, most of it on Capitol Hill. A decent portion of the latest run-up in gas prices--and the entire cause of recent spot shortages--is the direct result of the energy bill Congress passed last summer. That self-serving legislation handed Congress's friends in the ethanol lobby a mandate that forces drivers to use 7.5 billion gallons annually of that oxygenate by 2012.

At the same time, Congress refused to provide liability protection to the makers of MTBE, a rival oxygenate getting hit with lawsuits. So MTBE makers are leaving the market in a rush, while overstretched ethanol producers (despite their promises) are in no way equipped to compensate for the loss of MTBE in the fuel supply. Ethanol is also difficult to ship and store outside of the Midwest, which is causing supply headaches and spot gas shortages along the East Coast and Texas.

These columns warned Republicans this would happen. As recently as last year, ethanol was selling for $1.45 a gallon. By December it had reached $2 and is now going for $2.77. So refiners are now having to buy both oil and ethanol at sky-high prices. In short, the only market manipulation has been by politicians.

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For the record, the FTC has an entire crew that pores over weekly average gas prices in hundreds of cities, looking for evidence of gouging--to no avail. Perhaps this is because no oil company controls enough of the market to exercise enough power to raise prices. The Hastert-Frist call for an investigation is nothing but short-attention-span political theater.

Beyond the ethanol fiasco, the oil markets are once again providing a tutorial in supply and demand in a global commodity market. Strong economic growth from the U.S. to China is driving up demand, even as political uncertainty in oil-producing countries such as Venezuela and Iran is leading to supply worries and some speculation. The Federal Reserve has also played a role by flooding the market with dollar liquidity that has produced higher prices across all commodity markets.

Congress could help a little in the short term if it asked the Bush Administration to end the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff on imported ethanol. That would especially help drivers in coastal states suffering from spot shortages. Naturally, however, the domestic ethanol industry is threatening retribution against any Member who suggests such a thing; so much for industry gratitude.

The GOP might also refocus its attention on legislation the House passed last year to reduce the number of "boutique fuels" to six from 17. These special gasoline blends are required in different parts of the country in the name of reducing pollution. Their primary effect, however, is to raise gas prices and make it difficult to move gas around the country during shortfalls. The Environmental Protection Agency could also ease environmental rules for those parts of the country suffering shortages.

Meanwhile, we're also hearing more about the country's reliance on "foreign oil." But if Congress wants to ease that dependence, it will have to open more of the U.S. up to oil and gas exploration. Had the Senate opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to exploration when the Bush Administration requested it in 2001, some of this oil might now be joining American supplies. The same goes for natural gas drilling along the Outer Continental Shelf. Yet the very Democrats who deplore foreign supplies and shout about high prices vote again and again to block domestic oil exploration.

The last time the U.S. had a gasoline panic, in the wake of Katrina, some quick Bush Administration action and private ingenuity eased the problem in record time. Gasoline prices that had climbed above $3 a gallon quickly settled back closer to $2. Markets will make the same adjustments today if they are allowed to send price signals without Congress getting in the way. Republicans can blame business all they want for high prices, but sounding like liberal Democrats won't save them in November.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Pertinent question

Thomas Sowell asks a very good question:

Whatever the decision as to how many and what kind of immigrants should be let into the United States, why should that decision be made by people in Mexico, instead of being made here by Americans?

He actually asks several good questions. I recommend you read the whole thing.

Discrimination dance

Bob Weir, a former detective sergeant in the NYPD, and currently the executive editor of The News Connection in Highland Village, Texas, writes about Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney's shameful behavior. And he's taking no prisoners:

This ill-tempered, bigoted woman has already been given preferential treatment based on her sex, her color and her title – a title that she never misses an opportunity to abuse. A few years ago McKinney complained about being questioned by “white people� when she tried to force her way into the White House without being stopped.

Mr. Weir makes some good points. Go read the rest.

Topsy turvy

Deroy Murdock points out a disturbing trend among America's political Left. Here's how he starts:

The muted reaction to the murder of Virginia-based peace activist Tom Fox earlier this month highlights a puzzling phenomenon. While terrorists in Iraq -- like those who shot Fox in the head and chest and dumped his body beside a Baghdad railroad -- target the kind of people the Left champions in America, liberal Democrats stay mum while "their people" get seized, maimed, and killed over there. Rather than demand the total defeat of these butchers, Operation Iraqi Freedom's shrillest opponents instead accuse President Bush of carelessly blundering into war while brilliantly manipulating Democrats into authorizing hostilities. Al Qaeda's man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, elicits shrugs while America's true enemies, they suggest, are Guantanamo, the NSA terrorist-surveillance program, and the just-renewed Patriot Act.

Read the rest.

Change the subject

Fred Barnes, over at the Weekly Standard, has an op-ed about the Republican strategy for 2006. Here's how he starts:

POLITICS IS PRETTY SIMPLE. If the debate in an upcoming election puts your party at a disadvantage, it makes sense to try to change the debate. At the moment, the 2006 midterm election is framed as a referendum on the Bush administration and congressional Republicans, putting Republican candidates on the defensive. Party strategists, led by chairman Ken Mehlman, want to rejigger the debate so it's about a choice between candidates, putting Democratic candidates on the defensive as well. In short, they want it to be a choice election, not a referendum election.

It's an interesting read.

Banish Bennish

Economics professor, Dr. Walter E. Williams, has something to say about dishonesty in the classroom. Here's an excerpt:

It's academic and intellectual dishonesty when a teacher, who is supposed to be teaching geography, uses his classroom to indoctrinate relatively uninformed teenagers. Recording the teacher's comments broke neither school policy nor Colorado law. But more importantly, I believe that what teachers say in class should be subject to parental and public scrutiny.

As a parent who is married to a teacher, I agree wholeheartedly that teachers must have transparency to their lessons, and that they must keep their teaching based upon fact -- not opinion. They should be providing their students with the tools necessary to facilitate critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making.

Public teachers should never indoctrinate their students with the teacher's opinions or beliefs. All that does is show the teacher as being a close-minded, controlling, bigot . . .

Like the Taliban in 1990s Afghanistan, for example.

Hypocrisy at Yale

John Fund is taking no prisoners in his commentary about Yale welcoming a Taliban official as an honored student. He points out the inherent hypocrisy in Yale's position opposing military recruiters because of the way the military treats homosexuals, and the open-armed reception of a prominent member of the Taliban -- an organization that murdered homosexuals by bulldozing brick walls over them.

The article is in the extended entry. Recommended.

Taliban Man at Yale
University officials are embarrassed--but not embarrassed enough.

Monday, March 6, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

Are there no limits to how arrogant and out-of-touch America's Ivy League schools can get? Last week it emerged that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former deputy foreign secretary of the Taliban, is now a student at Yale while at the same time the school continues to block ROTC training from its campus and argues for the right of its law school to exclude military recruiters. King George's troops played the music to "The World Turned Upside Down" as they surrendered at Yorktown. Perhaps the Ivy League should adopt that tune as they surrender all vestiges of common sense.

Yale's decision to admit Mr. Rahmatullah is particularly jarring given constant reminders of the Taliban's crimes--both past and present. Last week, as President Bush visited democratic Afghanistan, its TV news aired fresh footage of beheaded bodies being paraded through a street. The men had been murdered because they opposed local Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists.

Last week I described Mr. Rahmatullah's remarkable visit to The Wall Street Journal's offices in the spring of 2001. After a meeting in which he defended the Taliban's treatment of women and said he hadn't seen any evidence that their "guest" Osama bin Laden was a terrorist, I felt I had looked into the face of evil.

I walked Mr. Rahmatullah out. I will never forget how he stopped at a picture window and stared up at the World Trade Center, which terrorists had failed to destroy in 1993. When I finally pried him away, I couldn't help but think, He must have been thinking about the one that got away.

You would think Yale would feel compelled to explain its decision to admit Mr. Rahmatullah. Instead, a cone of silence has descended over the university. Yale officials didn't return my calls or those of other reporters for several days last week. Finally on Friday, spokesman Tom Conroy said the university would have no comment, citing privacy concerns that preclude it from discussing any individual student.

Almost no one will now defend Mr. Rahmatullah's presence as a special student, even though a week ago many had no such inhibitions in a splashy New York Times magazine piece, which broke the news that he had been at Yale for eight months. In that piece, Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions before he took the same post at Stanford, explained that Yale had missed out on another foreign student of the same caliber as Mr. Rahmatullah but that "we lost him to Harvard," and "I didn't want that to happen again."

Now Mr. Shaw isn't returning phone calls, and much of the reaction from Yale to the outside world is downright hostile. One faculty member told me he wasn't interested in questions about Mr. Rahmatullah and accused me of pursuing "another Journal attack on Yale's lax liberal standards." He then threatened to attack me in print as "slimy."

At the same time, many Yale alumni and students tell me they are concerned that Yale refuses to explain why it honored Mr. Rahmatullah with a prize perch when countless well-qualified Americans--not to mention other Afghans--would jump at the chance but will never get it.

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To understand what prompted Yale to invite Mr. Rahmatullah to its campus, I interviewed several Yale students and faculty members. Here are their explanations along with my analysis.

The Taliban were a dictatorial regime, but not dramatically different from many others. Their coming to power was originally welcomed by many people tired of civil war.

It's certainly true that in 1996 the country more or less fell into the lap of the Taliban, a group of young fanatics straight out of "Lord of the Flies." After the Soviet departure from Afghanistan in 1989, the country had become an anarchic stew of feuding warlords. The Taliban consolidated power into a central government and soon had control of 90% of the country.

But as soon as they were secure in power, they revealed they were medieval fascists. Homosexuals were thrown into ditches and then had concrete walls bulldozed over them. Women caught wearing nail polish had their fingernails pulled out or in some cases their fingers chopped off. Everything was banned from television to kite flying to paper bags. Paper bags? Apparently one of the mullahs heard that bags in Kabul's market had been made out of recycled copies of the Koran, so they had to go.

Mr. Rahmatullah became an apologist for all of this during his propaganda tour of the U.S. in the months before 9/11. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" captured one testy exchange he had with an exiled Afghan woman who told him, "You have imprisoned the women. It's a horror, let me tell you." The Afghan diplomat responded with a sneer: "I'm really sorry for your husband. He must have a very difficult time with you." Asked by the Times of London last week if he regretted that statement now, he replied: "That woman, for your information, did divorce her husband." He told the New York Times that if he had it to do over again he would have been "a little bit" softer in his 2001 speeches.

Mr. Rahmatullah now sincerely regrets serving as a high Taliban official and has rejected their hatred of the West.

He does say that some of his views have changed. "I was very young then," Mr. Rahmatullah, now 27, told the Yale Daily News last week. "At that age, you don't really have the same sensibilities that you may have later." He has told fellow students he now believes in free speech and the right of women to vote. He told the New York Times the Taliban were bad for his country because "the radicals were taking over and doing crazy stuff," implying that the early days of Taliban rule were benign. He says he believes that after graduation, he can serve as a bridge between the Muslim world and the West.

If that's true, it's time that Yale and the State Department, which issued his student visa, realize that there's evidence his views are still pretty unreconstructed and, in fact, would be rejected by most of the world's Muslims. Mr. Rahmatullah isn't giving interviews now, but last Wednesday he did talk with Tim Reid of the Times of London. He acknowledged he had done poorly in his class "Terrorism: Past, Present and Future," something he attributed to his disgust with the textbooks. "They would say the Taliban were the same as al Qaeda," he told the Times.

He shifted blame for many of the Taliban's brutal practices onto its Ministry of Vice and Virtue, even though he had defended their actions in 2001. As for the infamous filmed executions of women in Kabul's soccer stadium? "That was all Vice and Virtue stuff. There were also executions happening in Texas."

One shouldn't depend on one interview for a full picture of someone's current views. But late last year, Mr. Rahmatullah wrote an essay titled "Ignorance! Not an Option," which appeared on the Web site of the International Education Foundation, the charity headed by CBS contract cameraman-producer Mike Hoover that is sponsoring Mr. Rahmatullah's stay in the U.S. In the essay, Mr. Rahmatullah takes Americans to task for both their "xenophobic" attitudes and ignorance of the Taliban. He claims the Taliban "were too ignorant to know that their guest"--Osama bin Laden--"was harming other people." He concludes that the Taliban "honestly practiced what they had learned in their religious schools. They did what they had been taught to do. Whether what they had been taught was good or bad is another subject." If this is sincere repentance, Yale needs to acknowledge that at the school that fathered literary deconstructionism, the term has lost its meaning.

Mr. Hoover, a swashbuckling filmmaker who has worked for CBS off and on for two decades and who befriended Mr. Rahmatullah during three visits to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, also holds curious views about his former hosts. He wouldn't return my calls, but when Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity asked him Friday if the Taliban was a "brutal" regime, Mr. Hoover would say only that "parts of them were. It wasn't as monolithic as we'd like to make it out to be."

Mr. Hannity quoted from Mr. Rahmatullah's article on the International Education Foundation's Web site in which Mr. Rahmatullah called Israel a "franchise state" serving "as an American al Qaeda against the Arab World." Mr. Hoover said, "I had never heard that before." In fact, not only did the article appear on a Web site Mr. Hoover operates, but after the al Qaeda quote appeared in the Yale Daily News on Wednesday, the article mysteriously vanished--two days before Mr. Hoover claimed to be unaware of it.

Yale needs to be an international school, tolerant of the views of other cultures and willing to understand them.

Having lived overseas as a child and traveled to many developing countries, I am all for students knowing more about the world. But the arguments for accepting Mr. Rahmatullah are surreal. "If we didn't accept him and try to learn from him, how could we say we're this diverse body and institution of higher learning?" freshman Benjamin Gonzalez asked the New York Sun. "If we just dismiss him, what does that say about us?" It may say that moral relativism has such an entrenched hold on campus that some people can no longer make needed distinctions.

Some, though, are more discerning. James Kirchick, a senior who describes himself as a liberal Democrat, is appalled that campus feminists and gays trash American society as intolerant but won't protest now that "an actual, live remnant of one of the most misogynistic and homophobic regimes ever" is in their midst. "They have other concerns, such as single-sex bathrooms and fraternities," he told me.

There was a time when some at Yale summoned outrage at the Taliban. In 2000, a band of 30 protesters gathered outside Pierson College when it hosted a "master's tea" for Taliban representative Abdul Hakeem Mujahid. While the protesters chanted outside, Mr. Mujahid calmly told his audience that "99% of [Afghan] women approve" of the Taliban and that the regime was committed to elevating the status of women in society. Eli Muller, the reporter who covered the event for the Yale Daily News, was shocked that his lies "went nearly unchallenged."

After the talk, Mr. Muller observed someone approach a spokeswoman for the Taliban and invite her to give a talk at the law school on women's rights. Mr. Muller concluded in an op-ed piece entitled "Sympathy for the Devil" that the "moral overconfidence of Yale students makes them subject to manipulation by people who are genuinely evil." That year, Lynn Amowitz, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, found that 18% of the 223 women she interviewed who lived under Taliban rule had attempted suicide by drowning in local rivers, drinking pesticides or overdosing on children's medicines.

Six years later, even after 9/11, the Yale community represents the world turned upside down. Beth Nisson, a senior, writes that Mr. Rahmatullah's admission to Yale "should serve as a model for American higher education." Della Sentilles, the co-author of a feminist blog at Yale, insists one can't be judgmental about the Taliban. "As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another," she writes. "American feminism is often linked to and manipulated by the state in order to further its own imperialist ends."

Ziba Ayeen, a Afghan-American who fled her native land with her family in the 1980s, isn't amused by such thinking. "The irony of Yale educating an official in a regime that barred women from going to school is too much," she told me.

When I asked several people at Yale if the reaction to Mr. Rahmatullah would be different if he were, say, a former official of the apartheid regime of South Africa, the reaction was universal: Of course he would be barred. When I asked why, I was told I had no idea how liberal a place Yale was. "But what is liberal about the Taliban, then or now?" I innocently asked. Eric White, a senior, told me that many students believe that regimes run by whites, such as apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany, come out of Western traditions and are judged differently than non-Western regimes. "There's a real feeling that we don't have the right or understanding to be able to hold those regimes to the same standards."

When I asked Prof. Vivek Sharma, who briefly had Mr. Rahmatullah in one of his seminars, about this double standard, he explained, "There's a belief among many at Yale that we really have to specifically understand the Middle East because of the American occupation there and that we must understand our enemies as deeply as we can."

But if Mr. Rahmatullah's admission was motivated by a desire to understand the enemy, why was Yale mum about Mr. Rahmatullah's background for eight months, until he himself chose to reveal it to the New York Times? Nat Hentoff, a columnist for the Village Voice and a First Amendment champion, says Mr. Rahmatullah's admission might have value as a "laboratory experiment" to see how far "tolerance of anti-tolerance" might go. "But the whole thing looks fishy given Yale's reluctance to tell people about their educational prize," he told me. "Thus it looks to be more about the lasting effects of political correctness than a desire to hear other points of view."

Somebody else is responsible for Mr. Rahmatullah's admission as a Yale student.

No one is more surprised than Mr. Rahmatullah at his good fortune. "I'm the luckiest person in the world," he told the New York Times. "I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale." What explains his luck?

The buck-passing has been brisk the past week. Yale has privately told some people that since the State Department approved his student visa, there must not be a problem with the former Taliban official. State Department spokesman Adam Erelli says that "given what he was doing and why he wanted to come to the United States, [there were no] grounds for ineligibility" for a visa. Another State Department official told me off the record that because Mr. Rahmatullah had been accepted by so prestigious an institution as Yale the probable assumption made by lower-level officials was that he was OK.

P.J. Crowley, a former official in the Clinton National Security Council, speculated that perhaps Mr. Rahmatullah had been an intelligence asset for the U.S. and his admission was a reward for that help. But my calls to several sources turned up no hint of that. Laili Helms, a former spokeswoman for the Taliban who lives in New Jersey, claims that Mr. Rahmatullah met with officials at the CIA and the State Department during his 2001 tour and proposed the Taliban hold Osama bin Laden in a fixed location long enough so the U.S. could find and kill him. My sources at both agencies say there is no evidence such a proposal was ever made.

So the mystery deepens. Even Mr. Hoover, who frequently visited the Taliban in an effort to secure an interview with Osama bin Laden, is vague about the details of why his charity is paying for his friend to come to the U.S. Indeed, it sounds as if he is shifting responsibility. When asked why Mr. Rahmatullah is here, he told Fox News: "Those are questions for all of the people all down the chain of command that have backed him coming to the country, starting with the American generals who OK'd it for him to come, the people in Islamabad that gave him the visa and the people at Yale who decided to put him on into the campus."

As for who finances his foundation, Mr. Hoover said it was a group of friends who after finding out "about his background, and heard his ideas, they were behind helping fund him to go to Yale."

Kurt Lohbeck, who worked with Mr. Hoover as a contract reporter/producer for CBS News in Afghanistan is skeptical about the whole matter. "I worked in the region for 10 years, and there are a lot of people there who should go to Yale before Rahmatullah," he told me. As for Mr. Hoover's curious ambivalence today about the Taliban, Mr. Lohbeck said Mr. Hoover would not have been able to go back so frequently as a guest of the Taliban "unless he had kowtowed to them on the first visit. They would have had to grease the skids for him."

For all his faults, Mr. Rahmatullah is a positive influence on campus.

How good a role model could Mr. Rahmatullah be? He got into Yale with a fourth-grade education and a high-school equivalency degree. Next month, he will apply to become a full-time student working towards a degree in political science. To his credit, Harold Hongju Koh, dean of Yale Law School and a former Clinton administration human-rights official, says that before Mr. Rahmatullah is accepted, "it would be good to know more about how he came to work for the Taliban in the first place and whether he's fully repudiated their views." Mr. Koh engaged in a somewhat heated debate with Mr. Rahmatullah at Yale during his 2001 U.S. tour and only "reluctantly" shook his hand afterwards.

Mr. Rahmatullah has retained his habit of heated argument. Last year, he attended Prof. Sharma's seminar on war in Europe during the Middle Ages. "He was antagonistic toward other students and he tended to take over the class discussion," one student recalled. "He would talk all the time about life in the mountains of Afghanistan." During the last class Mr. Rahmatullah attended, Mr. Sharma says, "he interrupted me constantly." When I asked the professor to confirm student reports that he had asked Mr. Rahmatullah to leave his class, he replied "That's not quite true. I forcefully made it clear what I thought of him wanting to draw attention to himself." Mr. Rahmatullah never returned to his class, taking advantage of an opt-out provision.

Others say Mr. Rahmatullah has been better behaved, albeit sometimes brusque. Amy Aaland, the executive director of the Jewish center where Mr. Rahmatullah frequently eats dinner, has no problems with him. She told the Yale Daily news that she sees his story "as representative of Yale's rich student diversity."

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But rather than defend their prize diversity catch, the university and the other enablers of Mr. Rahmatullah's presence there are clamming up and hoping the furor goes away. "Yale has weathered storms like this before with complete silence," one former Yale administrator told me. "It's cold game theory on their part. They've already alienated conservative alumni; they're not giving much anymore. If they can keep broader donor anger at bay, they feel they don't have much to lose."

Well, perhaps Yale does. In a column lamenting how Larry Summers was deposed as president of Harvard, the New York Times' John Tierney, a Yale graduate, reports on all the reasons American higher education refuses to change. He quotes Fred Siegel, a historian at Cooper Union, as saying "the Achilles' heel of academics is their status anxiety. The only way to attack them is with mockery."

It's been more than half a century since William F. Buckley mocked the wooly-headed thinking he found at his alma mater in "God and Man at Yale." Now we have Mr. Taliban Man at Yale. If that doesn't cry out for mockery, nothing does.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Global climate change

Steven F. Hayward has an informative article up about the uncertainty, scientifically and politically, of global climate change. Here's an excerpt:

If there is any subject more certain than the federal budget process to bring on eye-glaze, it is global warming and the drearily repetitive argument about the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The issue combines the worst of wonky numerology (parts per million of various gases, complex computer models, opaque cost-benefit analyses), an alphabet soup of unctuous international bureaucracies (IPCC, UNFCCC, SRES, TAR, USGCRP, etc., etc.), and the incessant braying of interest groups. No wonder Al Gore loves it so much. Yet the issue, seemingly stuck in a rut for almost two decades, is starting to shake loose and head in new directions.

It's rather long, but is much more comprehensive than what you get in news media snippets on the topic. Recommended.

Anger management

Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Public Affairs, has an op-ed up at OpinionJournal wherein he discusses empirical evidence of the Angry Left (and Right) getting Angrier. And, as we might think is obvious, it is not a good thing.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

Extreme Makeover
Scientific evidence that political anger is dangerous.

BY ARTHUR C. BROOKS
Monday, February 20, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

The Republican National Committee chairman publicly criticized Sen. Hillary Clinton after a series of intemperate remarks on her part, saying she "seems to have a lot of anger." While it made the news, this was hardly an earth-shattering observation. The criticism was also ironic, given that anger has become a standard tool for both parties. In fact, overheated political rhetoric has become so ordinary that most of us don't even take it seriously.

But we should. When one party's chairman calls the other party "criminal" (as one actually did recently, and the other might before this page goes to press), he is hoping to pull people to the fringe where they will be reliable voters. There is some evidence that this tactic is working: The percentage of people willing to say they are "extremely liberal" or "extremely conservative" is higher than it has been in over 30 years. And the data tell us that the people with these strong views often display a disturbing lack of compassion and ethics in their personal relations. As such, angry politics may be spilling over into our broader culture.

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To begin with, there is abundant evidence that extreme political opinions lead to the personal demonization of fellow citizens. Consider, for example, how those on the far left and far right respond when asked for a zero-to-100 score of their feelings toward people with whom they disagree politically. Political scientists find that scores below 20 on these so-called feeling thermometers are very unusual--except on the political fringes. Indeed, according to the 2004 National Election Study, one in five "extremely liberal" people gave conservatives a score of zero, a temperature you or I might reserve for Osama bin Laden. The same percentage of "extremely conservative" people gave liberals a zero.

Ironically, these angry folks tend to feel that they are more compassionate than others--while their personal actions tell a different story. Take people on the far left. According to the General Social Surveys in 2002 and 2004, those who say they're "extremely liberal" are 20 percentage points more likely than moderates to say they feel concern for less fortunate people. But this doesn't appear to translate well to a deep concern for any individual: This group is also 20 points less likely than moderates to say they'd "endure all things for the one I love." To some, this might support the stereotype that the far left loves humanity--but only in large groups.

Like extreme liberals, extreme conservatives are more compassionate in theory than in practice: They are slightly more likely than centrists to say they "feel protective of people who are taken advantage of." Unless, it seems, they are the ones taking advantage: It turns out they are substantially less likely than moderates to act honestly in small ways, such as returning change mistakenly given them by a cashier.

It may or may not be that extreme politics is by itself what makes a person angry and uncompassionate; but it certainly cannot be improving the situation. After all, the partisan political machine today is geared toward the destruction of opponents--to convince us that the other side is not just misguided, but evil. Mounting evidence that adherence to extreme political attitudes correlates with a fundamental lack of compassion is not encouraging for the future of our civic culture, as long as rage is used as a political device.

For our political leaders, a bit of anger management would be in the public interest.

Mr. Brooks is a professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Public Affairs.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

1776 politics

Jason, over at Generation Why? has a nicely assembled rebuttal to Senator Feingold's assertion that "The President is living in a pre-1776 world".

Highly recommended.

Welfare begets violence?

Dr. Helen, also known affectionately as the Instawife, is a psychologist who has recently posted about the fallacy of appeasement. Or 'How To Get A Bigger Welfare Check'. She starts with:

You would think that governments as well as people in general would understand that appeasing and rewarding negative behavior doesn't work. It's basic psychology 101--but one that not even most psychology professors understand or put to use. And apparently, this concept is foreign to many of the politically correct persuasion outside the classroom as well--for them, their feeling of moral "superiority" trumps human nature and causes liberals to turn a blind eye to justice and acts of violence.

Go read the rest. I recommend it.

A tale of two crises

Thomas Sowell has an opinion piece up over at Townhall that discusses two crises that we are currently facing in America. Here's how he starts:

This nation is facing two crises -- one phony and one real. Both in the media and in politics, the phony crisis is getting virtually all the attention.

You can probably figure out the phony crisis, but the real one is more subtle -- and much more sobering. I've been thinking along these lines for a while now, but Mr. Sowell does a much better job of articulating it than I would have.

Recommended.

On those who play politics at a funeral

"Rudeness and vulgarity are toughness for wimps."

-- Jack Kelly

Heh.

McCain and Obama

John McCain wrote an interesting letter to Barack Obama when Obama backed out of a bipartisan deal with McCain regarding lobby reform.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

February 6, 2006 The Honorable Barack Obama United States Senate SH-713 Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator Obama:

I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere. When you approached me and insisted that despite your leadership’s preference to use the issue to gain a political advantage in the 2006 elections, you were personally committed to achieving a result that would reflect credit on the entire Senate and offer the country a better example of political leadership, I concluded your professed concern for the institution and the public interest was genuine and admirable.

Thank you for disabusing me of such notions with your letter to me dated February 2, 2006, which explained your decision to withdraw from our bipartisan discussions. I’m embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble. Again, sorry for the confusion, but please be assured I won’t make the same mistake again.

As you know, the Majority Leader has asked Chairman Collins to hold hearings and mark up a bill for floor consideration in early March. I fully support such timely action and I am confident that, together with Senator Lieberman, the Committee on Governmental Affairs will report out a meaningful, bipartisan bill.

You commented in your letter about my “interest in creating a task force to further study� this issue, as if to suggest I support delaying the consideration of much-needed reforms rather than allowing the committees of jurisdiction to hold hearings on the matter. Nothing could be further from the truth. The timely findings of a bipartisan working group could be very helpful to the committee in formulating legislation that will be reported to the full Senate.

Since you are new to the Senate, you may not be aware of the fact that I have always supported fully the regular committee and legislative process in the Senate, and routinely urge Committee Chairmen to hold hearings on important issues. In fact, I urged Senator Collins to schedule a hearing upon the Senate’s return in January.

Furthermore, I have consistently maintained that any lobbying reform proposal be bipartisan. The bill Senators Joe Lieberman and Bill Nelson and I have introduced is evidence of that commitment as is my insistence that members of both parties be included in meetings to develop the legislation that will ultimately be considered on the Senate floor. As I explained in a recent letter to Senator Reid, and have publicly said many times, the American people do not see this as just a Republican problem or just a Democratic problem. They see it as yet another run-of-the-mill Washington scandal, and they expect it will generate just another round of partisan gamesmanship and posturing. Senator Lieberman and I, and many other members of this body, hope to exceed the public’s low expectations. We view this as an opportunity to bring transparency and accountability to the Congress, and, most importantly, to show the public that both parties will work together to address our failings.

As I noted, I initially believed you shared that goal. But I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party’s effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn’t always a priority for every one of us. Good luck to you, Senator.

Sincerely,
John McCain
United States Senate

Noonan remarks

Peggy Noonan, over at OpinionJournal, has a op-ed up about the SOTU address, the Democrat Party's downward spiral, Tom Shales, and Wendy Wasserstein.

Ms. Noonan seems depressed. None the less, the article is worth reading. I've reprinted it in the extended entry below.

'I Hope She Drowns'
The implosion of the Democratic Party. Plus Tom Shales's snobbery and a tribute to Wendy Wasserstein.

Thursday, February 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

The president's State of the Union Address will be little noted and not long remembered. There was a sense that he was talking at, not to, the country. He asserted more than he persuaded, and he chose to redeclare his beliefs rather than argue for them in any depth. If you believe, as he does, that the No. 1 priority for the American government at this point in history is to lead an international movement for political democracy, and if you believe, as he truly seems to, that political democracy is in and of itself a certain bringer of world-wide peace, than this speech was for you. If not, not. It went through a reported 30 drafts, was touched by many hands, and seemed it. Not precisely a pudding without a theme, but a thin porridge.

It was the first State of the Union Mr. Bush has given in which Congress seemed utterly pre-9/11 in terms of battle lines drawn. Exactly half the chamber repeatedly leapt to its feet to applaud this banality or that. The other half remained resolutely glued to its widely cushioned seats. It seemed a metaphor for the Democratic Party: We don't know where to stand or what to stand for, and in fact we're not good at standing for anything anyway, but at least we know we can't stand Republicans.

There was only one unforgettable moment, and that was in a cutaway shot, of Hillary Clinton, who simply must do something about her face. When the president joked that two people his father loves are turning 60 this year, himself and Bill Clinton--why does he think constant references to that relationship work for him?--it was Mrs. Clinton's job to look mildly amused, or pleasant, or relatively friendly, or nonhostile. Mrs. Clinton has two natural looks, the first being a dull and sated cynicism, the second the bright-eyed throaty chuckler who greets visiting rubes from Utica. The camera caught the first; by the time she realized she was the shot, she apparently didn't feel she could morph into the second. This canniest of politicians still cannot fake benignity.

---

Maybe she knew the habitués of the Daily Kos, and other leftwing Web sites, were watching. Conservatives are always writing about the strains and stresses within the Republican Party, and they are real. But the Democratic Party seems to be near imploding, and for that most humiliating of reasons: its meaninglessness. Republicans are at least arguing over their meaning.

The venom is bubbling on websites like Kos, where Tuesday afternoon, after the Alito vote, various leftists wrote in such comments as "F--- our democratic leaders," "Vichy Democrats" and "F--- Mary Landrieu, I hope she drowns." The old union lunch-pail Democrats are dead, the intellects of the Kennedy and Johnson era retired or gone, and this--I hope she drowns--seems, increasingly, to be the authentic voice of the Democratic base.

How will a sane, stable, serious Democrat get the nomination in 2008 when these are the activists to whom the appeal must be made?

Republicans have crazies. All parties do. But in the case of the Democrats--the leader of their party, after all, is the unhinged Howard Dean--the lunatics seem increasingly to be taking over the long-term health-care facility. Great parties die this way, or show that they are dying.

---

On the subject of political passion Tom Shales, longtime TV critic of the Washington Post and possessor of occasional eloquence, wrote a piece this week that deserves comment. I don't mean his State of the Union review, which began, "George Bush may or may not be the worst president since Herbert Hoover . . ." I mean his attack last Monday on "Flight 93," the A&E television movie on that fated 9/11 flight. Mr. Shales said it was shameful that vulgar dramatizers would "exploit" the pain of those on the flight and those they left behind. Or as he put it, he had, innocent that he is, thought it "unthinkable" that "even the sleaziest producers" would "exploit any aspect of a nightmare that the nation had witnessed in horror."

By exploit I think he means "remember." There is nothing vulgar, low or unhelpful about remembering the particular heroism of Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick and dozens of others. Their action--they stormed the cockpit that day, forced the plane down and kept it from hitting a Washington target, presumably the Capitol or the White House--was a moment of courage and sacrifice, and we all owe them a great deal. Imagine if the particular wound the hijackers meant to inflict had been successful that day. Imagine how much worse it would have been,

Remembering the men and women of Flight 93 isn't a self-indulgence but a duty. One senses in the Shales review the sneaky little suggestion that those who would remember, and who would tell this story (based by the way on the surviving telephone and other harrowing tapes of that flight) are in fact being political. But one suspects it is Mr. Shales who is being political. Maybe he fears those stupid Americans will get all emotional if they revisit part of the horror of that day, and go out and do something bad. Let's not speak of it lest the rabble be roused.

What a snob.

You wonder at the intemperance of angry young lefties and then think of the example set for them by exhausted old lefties.

---

Wendy Wasserstein was a gifted artist and a fine person. The two do not always go together and it's almost a relief when you find someone in whom they do. She was warm, brilliant and witty, and her work captured a part, a piece, of our era. Word that she was dying spread before word that she was sick, and the shock of it, when her lymphoma was reported in New York a few months ago, was like hearing that Michael Kelly had died.

The tragedy was sharpened by a sense of great work unfinished, of a life not ended but interrupted. Wasserstein's plays were beloved of liberals who lauded her as spokeswoman of a modern feminist point of view. Fair enough, but she struck me as altogether cannier and more grounded than that, and more independent too.

I had a conversation with her a few years ago in which she told me of her concern at the increasing politicization of higher education. I was struck by the depth of her concern; she had clearly spent a lot of time observing, finding out the facts, and coming to conclusions. I thought later about why I was surprised and realized I had associated her, unjustly, with Frank Rich, who approaches such issues as academic freedom with a mixture of bile and cowardice: There is no politically correct censorship, and if there is the Evangelicals did it.

Wasserstein's work had no cruelty and little fear. Her last play, "Third," dealt with a left-wing professor who comes to question her own assumptions, and to wonder, even, if deep in her heart she does not harbor bigotries. This was the work of someone who wasn't stuck, wasn't cowed, who was in fact questioning, questing. It is sad to not see what that mind would have done in the future. Rest in peace.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Hardliners hardwired?

The Washington Times has an interesting article about a study that found political opinions are based on emotion, not reason.

And we needed a study to tell us that?

[Hat tip to Betsy Newmark.]

Quotables

"The Founding Fathers did not foresee a permanent political class, out of touch with the people and in touch only with their careers and self-interests."

—Cal Thomas

"The current scandals in Washington should remind us just how far we have strayed from the vision of limited government the Founders handed down to us."

—John Fund

A political gesture

I happen to concur with this "Appeal from Center-Right Bloggers".

Wholeheartedly.

We are bloggers with boatloads of opinions, and none of us come close to agreeing with any other one of us all of the time. But we do agree on this: The new leadership in the House of Representatives needs to be thoroughly and transparently free of the taint of the Jack Abramoff scandals, and beyond that, of undue influence of K Street.

We are not naive about lobbying, and we know it can and has in fact advanced crucial issues and has often served to inform rather than simply influence Members.

But we are certain that the public is disgusted with excess and with privilege. We hope the Hastert-Dreier effort leads to sweeping reforms including the end of subsidized travel and other obvious influence operations. Just as importantly, we call for major changes to increase openness, transparency and accountability in Congressional operations and in the appropriations process.

As for the Republican leadership elections, we hope to see more candidates who will support these goals, and we therefore welcome the entry of Congressman John Shadegg to the race for Majority Leader. We hope every Congressman who is committed to ethical and transparent conduct supports a reform agenda and a reform candidate. And we hope all would-be members of the leadership make themselves available to new media to answer questions now and on a regular basis in the future.

Change Congress' approach

Jack Kemp has a very intriguing article about the need for ideas-based congressional leadership. And he provides some good ideas of his own about a few crucial issues that Congress seems to be ignoring. Here is how he starts:

The Wall Street Journal recently leveled a devastatingly accurate assessment of congressional Republicans: "House Republicans have become more passionate about retaining power than in using that power to change or limit the federal government ... a strategy (that) has maintained a narrow majority, but at the cost of doing anything substantial." The Journal was exactly right that Republican leaders "have become ever more preoccupied with process, money and incumbency," a frame of mind in which ideas are an afterthought when not actually an inconvenience.

I am very disappointed in the transformation of the Republican Party from the "Party of Change" into the "Party of Consolidation". Unfortunately, that means that we now have no political party that is concerned with making this country better. And neither party seems to have any real ideas. And when someone (like, for example, President Bush) comes up with unique and viable ideas for making this country better, the political hacks on both sides of the isle just start heaping ridicule and invective on the idea until it is exterminated.

What a proud heritage for this great nation.[/sarcasm]

I'll bet our founding fathers are greatly disappointed in how the political system in this country has degenerated into the disgrace it is today.[/cynicism]

Sorry . . . I just had to rant a bit. I do recommend Mr. Kemp's article, though.

Three ring circus

I submit the following New York Times article without comment:

But Enough About You, Judge; Let's Hear What I Have to Say

Yes, I really want to comment, but I will resist that almost undeniable urge . . . because these esteemed senators really require no additional commentary.

They've removed all doubt.

Earmarks

John Fund, over at OpinionJournal, has an op-ed up about earmarks, a corrupted appropriations process, and Congress. Here's an excerpt:

Nothing better illustrates the meltdown in spending restraint than earmarking, the process by which members secure special pork projects such as Alaska's infamous $223 million "bridge to nowhere." Pork is an inevitable product of political compromise, but earmarks are a particularly corrupt form. They are often last-minute additions to conference reports that were never considered in the original bills passed by either the House or Senate. They can thus avoid competitive bidding, performance standards or even disclosure of the direct recipient.

I copied the entire article into the extended entry.

Marks for Sharks
The Abramoff scandal may sink congressional Republicans if they don't get serious about spending reforms.

Monday, January 9, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

It's fitting that Rep. Tom DeLay is returning to his seat on the Appropriations Committee now that he is gone for good as House majority leader. It was his years serving in that "favor factory" that gradually turned him into a purveyor of pork who last fall claimed there was no more budget fat to cut. His departure gives Republicans a chance to return to first principles. If they don't, they may face a political drubbing.

Many Republicans have forgotten that as government grows, its increased power to grant favors or inflict pain attracts more people who would abuse the system. Sen. John McCain once told me that "the best long-term answer to corruption is a smaller government." Indeed, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff observed a decade ago, "More money available from government is blood in the water for sharks." He proved to be one hungry shark.

If the GOP response to the Abramoff scandal is merely to enact "lobbying reforms," the party will skirt the problem that underlies the corruption: runaway spending. "The 2001-2005 period marks the transformation of the Republican party from its traditional role as a win-or-lose guardian of limited government to that of a majority government party just as comfortable with big government as the Democrats, only with different spending priorities," says Chris DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute.

That's dangerous ground, given that the GOP base still believes in smaller government. Mr. Abramoff steered campaign cash to and hired staffers from members of both parties. But in 1994, after 350 members of both parties had been tarred by the House bank scandal, it was Republicans who were able to exploit it because Democrats controlled Congress.

---

Nothing better illustrates the meltdown in spending restraint than earmarking, the process by which members secure special pork projects such as Alaska's infamous $223 million "bridge to nowhere." Pork is an inevitable product of political compromise, but earmarks are a particularly corrupt form. They are often last-minute additions to conference reports that were never considered in the original bills passed by either the House or Senate. They can thus avoid competitive bidding, performance standards or even disclosure of the direct recipient.

In 1998, Congress approved 1,850 earmarks just for transportation projects. Last year's transportation bill contained 6,371. Earmarks have become the corrupt currency by which bills like the ruinously expensive prescription drug entitlement are bought vote by vote. They inevitably result in some lower-priority projects being funded first, with potentially disastrous results. In Louisiana, the Army Corps of Engineers spent $1.9 billion between 2000 and 2005, more than 80% of which was earmarked. Less than 4% of the total was spent on protecting levees, while over a third of the money went to building a new lock on an underused canal. Then along came Hurricane Katrina.

Earmarks have created their own parasitic specialized lobbying industry. "They go client hunting, telling cities or counties they can virtually guarantee an earmark," says Ron Utt, a former federal budget official now at the Heritage Foundation. In 2004, 3,521 companies or local governments hired lobbyists to pursue earmarks, up from just 1,865 four years earlier. A top White House aide told me that "there's need for lubrication of the legislative process, but it's gotten out of control."

Earmarks are at the heart of the scandals surrounding Mr. Abramoff and Duke Cunningham, the former GOP congressman who admitted to taking $2.4 million in bribes in exchange for earmarks. Military contractor Brian Wilkes not only lavished gifts on Mr. Cunningham but spent $1.1 million on lobbying others. The payoff: at least $95 million in government contracts. The Copley News Service reported that "Wilkes made no bones about where his money was coming from. His jet-black Hummer bore a license plate reading MIPR ME--a reference to Military Interdepartmental Purchase Requests," the means by which his firm got paid.

For his part, Mr. Abramoff bragged that appropriations committees were "earmark favor factories." His associate Tony Rudy e-mailed him asking if an Indian tribe client could pay for a hunting trip for Congressional staffers as a "thank you . . . for the approps we got." Other lobbyists have bosom-buddy relationships with key appropriators. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that House Appropriations chairman Jerry Lewis has steered hundreds of millions in federal funds to clients of lobbyist Bill Lowery, a former congressman who is so close to Mr. Lewis that they have exchanged two key staff members, "making their offices so intermingled that they seem to be extensions of each other."

---

Many congressional relatives earn a lucrative living as lobbyists for earmarks, including the brother of Rep. Jack Murtha (D., Pa.), the brother-in-law of Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Ted Stevens (R., Alaska) and the son of David Obey of Wisconsin, the ranking Democrat on House Appropriations.

Democrats vie with Republicans in priming the pork barrel, but some now see reform trumping pork politically. Several want to make sure that copies of bills are available 24 hours before a vote and limit endless roll-call votes so promises of earmarks can't as easily be used to bribe members.

Republicans face being outflanked if they don't get ahead of the earmark scandal. Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona wants all earmarks to be subject to debate and amendment. Others want a limit on how much local governments can use taxpayer dollars to lobby for still more federal dollars. Appropriations committee leaders could be required to stay within overall spending ceilings or forfeit their posts.

Sens. Tom Coburn and John McCain now plan to challenge every hidden earmark. "If we aren't told who is asking for it, who benefits and its justification, we'll move to strike it," Mr. Coburn told me. He expects many earmarks to be quietly withdrawn rather than face such scrutiny.

Rep. Paul Kanjorski, a Pennsylvania Democrat, once defended earmarks by saying bureaucrats can "prostitute the language" of the bills Congress writes so that "the normal process doesn't work." But now that earmarks are normal in Congress, they are prostituting the entire institution. Post-Abramoff, the local political benefits of bringing home pork will shrink in the harsh national spotlight that is about to shine on earmarks.

The federal government is now 250 times as big in real terms as it was a century ago. If Republicans don't use Mr. DeLay's departure to restore their limited-government credentials, they will see their own voters rebel.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

A concise analysis

Barry Casselman has an op-ed up at the Washington Times about how the Democrat party is spiraling downward. Here's how he starts:

The Democratic Party today reminds me of the hunter who carefully laid a trap for a bear, and when he came back the next day he forgot where he put it, stepped wrong and got caught in it, and then was himself eaten by the bear.

The game trophies of this year's midterm elections and the 2008 presidential elections, both now appearing to favor the Democrats, could end up in the jaws of Democratic defeat.

The rest is well worth reading . . .

The truth of his assertions troubles me, because this country needs relative equality between the Democrats and Republicans in order for American democracy to work most efficiently -- and most beneficially for the health of the nation and it's citizens. [/soapbox]

President's address 12-18-2005

President Bush addressed the nation Sunday night in a speech about Iraq,the war on terrorism, and our strategy for victory. Here's an excerpt:

All who had a part in this achievement -- Iraqis, and Americans and our coalition partners -- can be proud. Yet our work is not done. There is more testing and sacrifice before us. I know many Americans have questions about the cost and direction of this war. So tonight I want to talk to you about how far we have come in Iraq, and the path that lies ahead.

And here's the 12-19-2005 press conference regarding that strategy for victory over terrorism. An excerpt of his introduction:

This new threat required us to think and act differently. And as the 9/11 Commission pointed out, to prevent this from happening again, we need to connect the dots before the enemy attacks, not after. And we need to recognize that dealing with al Qaeda is not simply a matter of law enforcement; it requires defending the country against an enemy that declared war against the United States of America.

I highly recommend that you read both articles -- then you will be able to make up your own mind about what President Bush actually said (instead of depending on someone else for that very important information).

On gay cowboys and liberal politics

Mark Steyn does a great job in pointing out the absurdities of contemporary liberal politics. Here's a taste:

Bush lied, people dyed. Their fingers. That's what this is about: Millions of Kurds, Shia and Sunnis beaming as they emerge from polling stations and hold up their purple fingers after the freest, fairest election ever held in the Arab world. "Liberal" in the American sense is a dirty word because it's come to stand for a shriveled parochial obsolescent irrelevance, of which ''Good Night, and Good Luck,'' Clooney's dreary little retread of the McCarthy years, is merely the latest example. (Clooney says he wants more journalists to "speak truth to power," which is why I'm insulting his movie.)

The rest of his piece consists of humorous, but insightful, observations regarding the historic elections in Iraq and the concentrated efforts of liberal politicians to ignore them.

On Bush and spin

Peggy Noonan has an excellent op-ed over at OpinionJournal about what she thinks is wrong with Bush's approach to public relations.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

And I think she may be right.

It's Not About Bush
Has America turned a corner on Iraq?

Thursday, December 15, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

The four-part Iraq speech cycle on which the president has embarked, and that culminated yesterday in his remarks before the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, may well mark a turning in his public leadership of the war. His arguments on the war, and his assertions about what is happening on the ground and what is desired there, were more comprehensive, seemingly more candid, and thus more persuasive than he has been in the past 12 months. Coupled with today's voting it may mark a real turning point.

One of the things I think the president communicated most effectively, if mostly between the lines, was the sense that some decisions a president faces don't promise good outcomes no matter which way he comes down. These are decisions that carry deep implications, and promise real difficulty.

And one such was: To move on Saddam or not?

Do nothing about Saddam, or nothing that hasn't been done before, and you keep in place a personally unstable dictator who has declared himself an avowed enemy of America, who will help and assist its foes at a crucial time, and who has developed and used in recent memory and against his own citizens weapons of mass destruction. Do nothing and you face the continuance of a Mideast status quo encrusted by cynicism and marked by malignancy.

But remove Saddam and you face the cost in blood and treasure of invasion, occupation and the erection of democracy. It's all a great gamble. It could end with the yielding up of a new ruling claque as bad as or worse than the one just replaced. You could wind up thinking you'd bitten off more than you could chew and were trying to swallow more than you could digest.

No matter what Mr. Bush chose, what decision he made, he would leave some angry and frustrated. No matter what he did, the Arab street would be restive (it is a restive place) the left would be angry (rage is their ZIP code, where they came from and where they live), and Democrats would watch, wait, offer bland statements and essentially hope for the worst. Imagine a great party with only one leader, Joe Lieberman, who approaches the question of Iraq with entire seriousness. And imagine that party being angry with him because he does.

Mr. Bush chose to remove Saddam and liberate Iraq from, well, Saddam. And maybe more. Maybe from its modern sorry past. Pat Buchanan said a few months ago something bracing in its directness. He said a constitution doesn't make a country; a country makes a constitution. But today, in the voting, we may see more of the rough beginnings of a new exception to that rule. News reports both in print and on television also seem to be suggesting a turn. They seem to suggest a new knowledge on the ground in Iraq that democracy is inevitable, is the future, and if you don't want to be left behind you'd better jump in. One senses a growing democratic spirit. A sense that daring deeds can produce real progress.

'Tis devoutly to be wished, and all of good faith must wish it.

---

In his speech yesterday the president said the obvious: that the intelligence received in the buildup to the war was faulty. He asserted that Saddam's past and present history justified invasion nonetheless. This left me thinking again about a particular part of the WMD story. I decided my own position in support of invasion after Colin Powell warned the U.N. in dramatic terms of Saddam's development of weapons that were wicked, illegal and dangerous to the stability of the world. It is to me beyond belief that he was not speaking what he believed to be true. And I believed him, as did others.

Later Howard Dean, that human helium balloon ever resistant to the gravity of mature judgment, said of the administration that they lied us into war. He left no doubt that he meant they did it deliberately and cynically. But there seems to me a thing that is blindingly obvious, and yet I've never seen it remarked upon. It is that an administration that would coldly lie us into Iraq is an administration that would lie about what was found there. And yet the soldiers, searchers and investigators who looked high and low throughout Iraq made it clear they had found nothing, an outcome the administration did not dispute and came to admit. But an administration that would lie about reasons would lie about results, wouldn't it? Or try to? Yet they were candid.

Wouldn't it be good if our serious journalists and historians looked into what happened to weapons that Saddam once used and once had? He abused weapons inspectors who came looking, acting like a man who had a great deal to hide. And wouldn't it be good for our serious journalists and historians to look into exactly how it is that faulty intelligence, of such a crucial nature and at such a crucial moment, came to America and Britain? It is still amazing. Oh, for journalists and historians who would look only for truth and not merely for data that justify their politics and ideology.

---

I have been thinking about what hasn't worked, in the year since the 2004, election about the president's communication of his aims and efforts in Iraq. Or rather why it didn't work, why it seemed unpersuasive, why his statements seemed more repetitive than memorable. The president's focus was fractured, and by a number of things. By ill judgment--deciding Social Security was the new No. 1 issue. By bad luck--Katrina, etc. And by tone deafness, from "You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie" to Harriet Miers. The Iraq picture got blurred. But when a political picture gets blurred, people wonder if the blurring isn't deliberate and diversionary, a way of taking everyone's eyes off the facts. Skepticism grows.

And there is I think another part. It is that this White House believes way too much in spin.

David Brooks noted last Sunday on "Meet the Press" that in private Bush aides are knowledgeable and forthcoming about the war--this is working, this isn't, we made a mistake here and are fixing it in this way--but that in public they rely too much on platitudes and talking points.

It's true. The Bush White House treats the message of the day as if it were the only raft in high seas. Hold, cling, don't let go. Their discipline seems not persuasive but panicky.

They think their adherence to spin is sophisticated and ahead of the curve, but it is not. What is sophisticated is to know that the American people have been immersed in media for half a century and know when they're being talked to by robots who got wound up in the spin shop. They are not impressed by rote repetition, cheery insistence or clunky symbolism. They see through it. When you have the president make a big speech and he's standing under the sign that says VICTORY, the American people actually know you're trying to send an unconscious message: Bush equals victory, Bush will bring victory, victory is coming. It's not so much nefarious as corny.

There is the sense sometimes with this White House that they learned more from Bill Clinton than from Ronald Reagan. What did Mr. Clinton and his spinners and handlers and media mavens and compulsive line-givers teach us? "It's all about Bill." He's the man, he's at the center, he's so brilliant. He had a tough childhood, he's building a legacy, it's Bill Bill Bill.

The Bush White House--and the president--have in the same way made Iraq a Bush drama. Bush won't cut and run, Bush has personal relationships, Bush is like Harry Truman, Bush will hold to his word. Look, he's landing on an aircraft carrier. It's all about Bush.

Modern White Houses think the man has to be the emblem of the actions. But thinking this way is not helpful, not in any serious way, and the Bush White House should stop it. Because it's mildly creepy; because it puts too much on your guy, which means he has to be lucky for everything to work, and nothing's worse to rely on in politics than luck. And most important because it's actually not about Bush, it's about America.

Ronald Reagan fought a war, but he didn't think it was about him, he thought it was about America. He didn't think it was about his principles; he thought it was about America's. He didn't land on aircraft carriers; he built them.

This war isn't about Bush, or shouldn't be, or can't be if it is to have meaning, and to end in success. It's bigger than that. It's bigger than him.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," just out from Penguin, which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Election: Iraq -- the day after

Mohammed posts about yesterday's election in Iraq.

It was a day of happiness for Iraqis and a day of loss for the strangers who thought their camels brought them to a land void of patriots.

It is a day we will await to come again for four long years…to do the right thing again or to correct the mistake if we did one yesterday.
Anyway, I believe we left a mark on the face of history, a purple mark that will not be forgotten easily.

God bless Iraq and Iraq's friends throughout this world. It wasn't our day alone; it was your day too.

Aash al-Iraq . . . Aash al-Iraq.

We celebrate with you, Mohammed. You made history yesterday.

President's speech on 12-14-2005

President Bush made another speech outlining the reasons for and goals of our war on terror. There are similar elements in this speech to his speech on Monday, but he is fleshing out his positions and plans. Here's an excerpt:

We saw the future the terrorists intend for our nation on that fateful morning of September the 11th, 2001. That day we learned that vast oceans and friendly neighbors are no longer enough to protect us. September the 11th changed our country; it changed the policy of our government. We adopted a new strategy to protect the American people: We would hunt down the terrorists wherever they hide; we would make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them; and we would advance our security at home by advancing freedom in the Middle East.

Sooni, an Iraqi man living in Baghdad, was able to watch the speech on television there and said in his blog that our President's speech was very encouraging, and accurately reflected the sentiments of citizens of Iraq.

President Bush really did a good job of providing more insight into his decisions and his plans for the future in our war against terrorism. Recommended -- especially after reading his speech from Monday (12-12).

Defeat from the jaws of victory

Norman Podhoretz has an interesting op-ed up at OpinionJournal about the American panic over Iraq. He compares the panic here in 1776-77, during the Revolutionary War, to our present one:

Yet in spite of these similarities, there is also a very curious difference between the American panic of 1776-77 and the American panic of 2005-06. To put it in the simplest and starkest terms: In that early stage of the Revolutionary War, there was sound reason to fear that the British would succeed in routing Washington's forces. In Iraq today, however, and in the Middle East as a whole, a successful outcome is staring us in the face. Clearly, then, the panic over Iraq--which expresses itself in increasingly frenzied calls for the withdrawal of our forces--cannot have been caused by the prospect of defeat. On the contrary, my twofold guess is that the real fear behind it is not that we are losing but that we are winning, and that what has catalyzed this fear into a genuine panic is the realization that the chances of pulling off the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory are rapidly running out.

Though long, this one is well worth reading. I've reprinted the entire article in the extended entry.

AT WAR

The Panic Over Iraq
What they're really afraid of is American success.

BY NORMAN PODHORETZ
Monday, December 12, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

Like, I am sure, many other believers in what this country has been trying to do in the Middle East and particularly in Iraq, I have found my thoughts returning in the past year to something that Tom Paine, writing at an especially dark moment of the American Revolution, said about such times. They are, he memorably wrote, "the times that try men's souls," the times in which "the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot" become so disheartened that they "shrink from the service of [their] country."

But Paine did not limit his anguished derision to former supporters of the American War of Independence whose courage was failing because things had not been going as well on the battlefield as they had expected or hoped. In a less famous passage, he also let loose on another group:

'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. . . . Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses . . . Their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain for ever undiscovered.

Thus, he explained, "Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head," emboldened by the circumstances of the moment to reveal an opposition to the break with Britain that it had previously seemed prudent to conceal.

The similarities to our situation today are uncanny. We, too, are in the midst of a rapidly spreading panic. We, too, have our sunshine patriots and summer soldiers, in the form of people who initially supported the invasion of Iraq--and the Bush Doctrine from which it followed--but who are now abandoning what they have decided is a sinking ship. And we, too, are seeing formerly disguised opponents of the war coming more and more out into the open, and in ever greater numbers.

Yet in spite of these similarities, there is also a very curious difference between the American panic of 1776-77 and the American panic of 2005-06. To put it in the simplest and starkest terms: In that early stage of the Revolutionary War, there was sound reason to fear that the British would succeed in routing Washington's forces. In Iraq today, however, and in the Middle East as a whole, a successful outcome is staring us in the face. Clearly, then, the panic over Iraq--which expresses itself in increasingly frenzied calls for the withdrawal of our forces--cannot have been caused by the prospect of defeat. On the contrary, my twofold guess is that the real fear behind it is not that we are losing but that we are winning, and that what has catalyzed this fear into a genuine panic is the realization that the chances of pulling off the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory are rapidly running out.

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Of course, to anyone who relies entirely or largely on the mainstream media for information, it will come as a great surprise to hear that we are winning in Iraq. Winning? Militarily? How can we be winning militarily when, day after day, the only thing of any importance going on in that country is suicide bombings and car bombings? When neither our own troops nor the Iraqi forces we have been training are able to stop the "insurgents" from scoring higher and higher body counts? When every serious military move we make against the strongholds of these dedicated and ruthless adversaries is met with "fierce resistance"? When, for every one of them we manage to kill, two more seem to pop up?

Winning? Politically? How can we be winning politically when the very purpose for which we allegedly invaded Iraq has been unmasked as a chimera? When every step we force the Iraqis to take toward democratization is accompanied by angry sectarian strife between Shiites and Sunnis and between Arabs and Kurds? When our clumsy efforts to bring the Sunnis into the political process have hardly made a dent in their support for the insurgency? When the end result is less likely to be the stable democratic regime we supposedly went there to establish than a civil war followed by the breakup of Iraq into three separate countries?

There has been one great exception to this relentless drumbeat of bad news. It occurred in January 2005, in the coverage of the first election in liberated Iraq. To the astonishment of practically everyone in the world, more than eight million Iraqis came out to vote on election day even though the Islamofascist terrorists had threatened to slaughter them if they did. This very astonishment was a measure of how false an impression had been created of the state of affairs in Iraq. No one fed by the mainstream media could have had the slightest inkling that these eight million people were actually there, so invisible had they been to reporters who spent all their time interviewing the discontented Iraqi man-in-the-street and to cameras seemingly incapable of focusing on anything but carnage and rubble.

But the mainstream media soon recovered from the shock. By October, on the morning after a second ballot in which the new Iraqi constitution was ratified by fully 79% of the electorate, the Washington Post ran its announcement of these inspiring results on page 13. As for the paper's front page, the columnist Jeff Jacoby would note that it

was dominated by a photograph, stretched across four columns, of three daughters at the funeral of their father, . . . who had died from injuries suffered during a Sept. 26 bombing in Baghdad. Two accompanying stories, both above the fold, were headlined "Military Has Lost 2,000 in Iraq" and "Bigger, Stronger, Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of U.S. Deaths." A nearby graphic--"The Toll"--divided the 2,000 deaths by type of military service.

In sum, in the words of the Australian blogger Arthur Chrenkoff:

Death, violence, terrorism, precarious political situation, problems with reconstruction, and public frustration (both in Iraq and America) dominate, if not overwhelm, the mainstream media coverage and commentary on Iraq.

About a year ago, concerned that he might have been exaggerating when he made this assertion on the basis of his "gut feeling," Mr. Chrenkoff decided to check it out more scientifically. So he did "a little tally" of the stories published or broadcast all over the world on a single average day (which happened to be Jan. 21, 2005). Here are some of the numbers that, with the help of the Google News Index, he was able to report from that one day:

• 2,642 stories about Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings, in the context of grilling she has received over the administration's Iraq policy.



• 1,992 stories about suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks.



• 887 stories about prisoner abuse by British soldiers.



• 216 stories about hostages currently being held in Iraq.



• 761 stories reporting on activities and public statements of insurgents.



• 357 stories about the antiwar movement and the dropping public support for involvement in Iraq.



• 182 stories about American servicemen killed and wounded in operations.



• 217 stories about concerns for fairness and validity of Iraqi election (low security, low turnout, etc.).



• 107 stories about civilian deaths in Iraq.



• 123 stories noting Vice President Cheney's admission that he had underestimated the task of reconstruction.



• 118 stories about complicated and strained relations between the U.S. and Europe.



• 121 stories discussing the possibility of an American pullout.



• 27 stories about sabotage of Iraqi oil infrastructure.

As against all this, the good news made a pathetic showing:

• 16 stories about security successes in the fight against insurgents.



• 7 stories about positive developments relating to elections.



• 73 stories about the return to Iraq of stolen antiquities.

Obviously, then, the reporters and their editors in the mainstream media have been working overtime to show how badly things have been going for us in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the op-ed pundits, the academic theorists and the armchair generals have chimed in with analyses blaming it all on the incompetence of the president and his appointees. By now, the proposition that the aftermath of the invasion has been marked by one disastrous blunder after another is accepted without question or qualification by just about everyone: open opponents of the Bush Doctrine eager to prove that they were right to denounce the invasion; Democrats whose main objective is to discredit the Bush administration; and erstwhile supporters who have lost heart and are looking for a way to justify their desertion.

But the charge of incompetence has also been hurled by strong supporters of the Bush Doctrine in general and of the invasion of Iraq in particular, whose purpose is to prod the people running the operation into doing a better job. The most authoritative such supporter, Eliot A. Cohen of Johns Hopkins, has expressed a

desire--barely controlled--to slap the highly educated fool who, having no soldier friends or family, once explained to me that mistakes happen in all wars, and that the casualties are not really all that high, and that I really shouldn't get exercised about them.

Now, this person may well have deserved a slap for being presumptuous toward a distinguished military historian, or for insensitivity in downplaying casualties when speaking to the father of an infantry officer on his way to Iraq. But at the risk of exposing myself as another highly educated fool, I must confess that I too think we need to be reminded that mistakes happen in all wars, and that the casualties in this one are very low by any historical standard.

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Before measuring Iraq in these two respects, I want to look more closely at some of the actions taken by the Bush administration that are universally accepted as mistakes, and to begin by pointing out that the main one is based on an outright falsification of the facts. This is the accusation that no thought was given to what would happen once we got to Baghdad and no plans were therefore made for dealing with the aftermath of the combat phase. Yet the plain truth is that much thought was given to, and many plans were made for dealing with, horrors that everyone expected to happen and then, mercifully, did not. Among these: house-to-house fighting to take Baghdad, the flight of a million or more refugees, the setting of the oil fields afire, and the outbreak of a major civil war.

As for the insurgency, even if its dimensions had accurately been foreseen, it would still have been impossible to eliminate it in short order. To cite Mr. Cohen himself:

If the insurgencies in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Kashmir continue, what reason do we have to expect this one to end so soon?

A related group of alleged "mistakes" turn out on closer inspection to be judgment calls, concerning which it is possible for reasonable men to differ. The most widely circulated of these--especially among supporters of the war on the right--is that there were too few American "boots on the ground" to mount an effective campaign against the insurgency. Perhaps. And yet the key factor in fighting a terrorist insurgency is not the number of troops deployed against it but rather the amount and quality of the intelligence that can be obtained from infiltrating its ranks and from questioning prisoners (a task made all the more difficult for us by the campaign here at home to define torture down to the point where it would become illegal to subject even a captured terrorist to generally accepted methods of interrogation).

Finally, there are "mistakes" that were actually choices between two evils--choices that had to be made when it was by no means obvious which was the lesser of the two. The best example here is the policy of "de-Baathification." This led to a disbanding of the Iraqi army, whose embittered Sunni members were then putatively left with nothing to do but volunteer their services to the insurgency. Yet allowing Saddam Hussein's thugs to continue controlling the army would have embittered the Shiites and the Kurds instead, both of whom had suffered greatly at the hands of the Sunni minority. Is it self-evident that this would have been better for us or for Iraq?

However, even if I were to concede for the sake of argument that every one of these accusations was justified, I would still contend that they amounted to chump change when stacked up against the mistakes that were made in World War II--a war conducted by acknowledged giants like Roosevelt and Churchill. Tim Cavanaugh, in a posting on the website of Reason magazine, has offered a partial list of such blunders and the lives that were lost because of them: "American Marines were slaughtered at Tarawa because the pre-invasion bombardment of the island was woefully deficient. Hundreds of American paratroopers were killed by American anti-aircraft fire during landings in Italy--for that matter the entire campaign up the Italian boot was an obvious waste of time, resources, and lives that prevented the western Allies from getting seriously into the war until the middle of 1944. . . . In late 1944, Allied commanders failed to anticipate that the Germans would attack through Belgium despite their having done so in 1914 and 1940." In brief, Cavanaugh concludes, "On any given week, World War II offered more [foul-ups] and catastrophes than anything that has been seen in postwar Iraq."

And I would also still say, as I have said before, that the number of American casualties in Iraq is minimal as compared with the losses suffered in past wars: in World War II, 405,399; in Korea, 36,574; in Vietnam, 58,209. Similarly, the mistakes--again assuming they were mistakes rather than debatable judgment calls--committed in the first year after the fall of Saddam were relatively inconsequential when measured against those made in the aftermath of the Allied victories over Germany and Japan.

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Several Iraqi bloggers, and many letters written by American soldiers in the field that have found their way onto the Internet, paint a very different picture. Like Arthur Chrenkoff, these close-range observers do not overlook the persistence of major problems, and they do not deny that we still have a long way to go before Iraq becomes secure, stable and democratic. But they document with great detail the amazing progress that has been made, even under the gun of Islamofascist terrorism, in building--from scratch--the political morale of a country ravaged by "posttotalitarian stress disorder," in setting up the institutional foundations of a federal republic, in getting the economy moving, and in reconstructing the physical infrastructure.

The columnist Max Boot, who has himself been free with charges of incompetence, and who takes the position that we should have put more troops into Iraq, can (like Eliot Cohen) see clearly through his own reservations to provide a good summary of the situation as it now stands:

For starters, one can point to two successful elections . . ., on Jan. 30 and Oct. 15, in which the majority of Iraqis braved insurgent threats to vote. The constitutional referendum in October was particularly significant because it marked the first wholesale engagement of Sunnis in the political process. . . . This is big news. The most disaffected group in Iraq is starting to realize that it must achieve its objectives through ballots, not bullets.

Moving on to the economy, Mr. Boot (relying on a Brookings Institution report) tells us that "for all the insurgents' attempts to sabotage the Iraqi economy," per capita income has doubled since 2003 and is now 30% higher than it was before the war; that the Iraqi economy is projected to grow at a whopping 16.8% in 2006; and that there are five times as many cars on the streets than in Saddam Hussein's day, five as many more telephone subscribers, and 32 times as many Internet users.

Finally, Mr. Boot points out that whereas not a single independent media outlet existed in Iraq before 2003, there are now 44 commercial TV stations, 72 radio stations, and more than 100 newspapers.

To all of this we can add the 3,404 public schools, 304 water and sewage projects, 257 fire and police stations, and 149 public-health facilities that had been built as of September 2005, with another 921 such projects currently under construction.

As for the military front, a November 2005 report by the Committee on the Present Danger cites an example of what is being accomplished by American troops:

In the recent Operation Steel Curtain on the Syrian border, our troops detained more than 1,000 suspected insurgents. One hundred weapons caches were found and cleared. Since January, 116 of Zarqawi's lieutenants have been killed or captured.

The CPD report also notes the steady strengthening of the Iraqi armed forces, and the increasing degree of responsibility they are assuming in the fight against the insurgency:

[Since July] Iraq's armed forces . . . have added 22 new battalions, and 5,500 police-service personnel have been trained and equipped (as have some 2,000 special-police commanders). Coalition senior officers report that 80 Iraqi battalions now are able to fight alongside our troops and 36 are "generally able to conduct independent operations." More than 20 of the coalition's forward-operating bases have been turned over to the Iraqi army.

The CPD supports the campaign in Iraq. Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies is (to put it mildly) unfriendly to the Bush Doctrine and all its works. But Mr. Cordesman concurs with the CPD assessment. Citing slightly different statistics, he notes

continued increase in the number of Iraqi units able to take the lead in combat operations against the insurgency . . . progress of Iraqi units in assuming responsibility for the battle space . . . [and] continued increase in the number of units and individuals trained, equipped, and formed into operational status.

What this means in concrete terms is laid out by Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, also no great admirer of how the Bush administration has conducted the Iraq campaign:

For two years, when reporters would ask how it was possible that the mightiest military in history could not secure a five-kilometer stretch of road, the military responded with long, jargon-filled lectures. . . . Then one day this summer the military was ordered to secure the road. . . . Presto. Using Iraqi forces, the road was secured. Similar strategies have made cities like Najaf, Mosul, Tal Afar and even Falluja much safer today than they were a year ago.

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Why is there so little public awareness of these things? One young reporter, who proudly proclaims his membership in the mainstream media, has been only too happy to provide an explanation:

As long as American soldiers are getting killed nearly every day, we're not going to be giving much coverage to the opening of multimillion dollar sewage projects. American lives are worth more than Iraqi shit.

Observe, in this clever and brutal formulation, the professed concern with American casualties. From it, one might imagine that the statement is worlds away from the hostility to American military power--and to America in general--that pervaded the radical left in the 1960s and that in a milder liberal mutation came to be known as the "post-Vietnam syndrome." And it is certainly true that the antiwar movement spawned by Vietnam rarely had a tear to shed for the American lives that were being lost there. But the newfound tenderness toward our troops in Iraq does not in the least reflect a change in attitude toward the use of force by the United States. To the contrary, the relentless harping on American casualties by the mainstream media is part of an increasingly desperate effort to portray Iraq as another Vietnam: a foolish and futile (if not immoral and illegal) resort to military power in pursuit of a worthless (if not unworthy) goal.

Mark Twain once famously said that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. So it was, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the post-Vietnam syndrome. During those early weeks, a number of commentators were quick to proclaim the birth of an entirely new era in American history. What Dec. 7, 1941 had done to the isolationism of old, they announced, Sept. 11, 2001 had done to the Vietnam syndrome. Politically speaking, it was dead, and the fallout from the Vietnam War--namely, the hostility to America and especially to American military power--would follow it into the grave.

As is evident from the coverage of Iraq in the mainstream media, such pronouncements were more than a little premature: the Vietnam syndrome is still alive and well. But equally apparent is that the reporters and editors to whom it is a veritable religion understand very clearly that success in Iraq could deal the Vietnam syndrome a mortal blow. Little wonder, then, that they have so resolutely tried to ignore any and all signs of progress--or, when that becomes impossible, to dismiss them as so much "shit."

This, however, is at least a kind of tribute to our progress, if a perverse one. The same cannot be said of the opponents of the Bush Doctrine in the universities and think tanks, who are unwilling even to acknowledge that more and better things are happening in Iraq and the broader Middle East than are dreamed of in their philosophy.

Take Zbigniew Brzezinski, who left the academy to serve as Jimmy Carter's national security adviser and is now a professor again. In a recently published piece entitled "American Debacle," Mr. Brzezinski began by accusing George W. Bush of "suicidal statecraft," went on to pronounce the intervention in Iraq (along with everything else this president has done) a total disaster, and ended by urging that we withdraw from that country "perhaps even as early as next year." Unlike the late Sen. George Aiken of Vermont, who once proposed that we declare victory in Vietnam and then get out, Mr. Brzezinski wants to declare defeat in Iraq and then get out. This, he mysteriously assures us, will help restore "the legitimacy of America's global role."

Now I have to admit that I find it a little rich that George W. Bush should be accused of "suicidal statecraft" by, of all people, the man who in the late 1970s helped shape a foreign policy that emboldened the Iranians to seize and hold American hostages while his boss in the Oval Office stood impotently by for almost six months before finally authorizing a rescue operation so inept that it only compounded our national humiliation.

And where was Mr. Brzezinski--famed at the time for his anticommunism--when the President he served congratulated us on having overcome our "inordinate fear of communism"? Where was Mr. Brzezinski--known far and wide for his hard-line determination to resist Soviet expansionism--when Cyrus Vance, the then secretary of state, declared that the Soviet Union and the United States had "similar dreams and aspirations," and when Mr. Carter himself complacently informed us that containment was no longer necessary? And how was it that, despite daily meetings with Mr. Brzezinski, Mr. Carter remained so blind to the nature of the Soviet regime that the invasion of Afghanistan, as he himself would admit, taught him more in a week about the nature of that regime than he had managed to learn in an entire lifetime? Had the cat gotten Mr. Brzezinski's tongue in the three years leading up to that invasion--the same tongue he now wags with such confidence at George W. Bush?

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But even if Mr. Brzezinski's record over the past 30 years did not disqualify him from dispensing advice on how to conduct American foreign policy, this diatribe against Mr. Bush would by itself be enough. For here he looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees the United States being "stamped as the imperialistic successor to Britain and as a partner of Israel in the military repression of the Arabs." This may not be fair, he covers himself by adding; but not a single word does he say to indicate that the British created the very despotisms the United States is now trying to replace with democratic regimes, or that George W. Bush is the first American president to have come out openly for a Palestinian state.

Again Mr. Brzezinski looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and by extension Guantanamo, causing the loss of America's "moral standing" as a "country that has stood tall" against "political repression, torture, and other violations of human rights." And that is all he sees--quite as though we never liberated Afghanistan from the theocratic tyranny of the Taliban, or Iraq from the fascist despotism of Saddam Hussein. But how, after all, when it comes to standing tall against "political repression, torture, and other violations of human rights," can such achievements compare with a sanctimonious lecture by Jimmy Carter followed by the embrace of one Third World dictator after another?

Then for a third time Mr. Brzezinski looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees more and more sympathy for terrorism, and more and more hatred of America, being generated throughout the region by our actions in Iraq; and in this context, too, that is all he sees. About the momentous encouragement that our actions have given to the forces of reform that never dared act or even speak up before, he is completely silent--though it is a phenomenon that even so inveterate a hater of America as the Lebanese dissident Walid Jumblatt has found himself compelled to recognize. Thus, only a few months after declaring that "the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is legitimate and obligatory," Mr. Jumblatt suddenly woke up to what those U.S. soldiers had actually been doing for the world in which he lived:

It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting [in January 2005], eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.

The columnist Michael Barone has listed some of the developments that bear out Jumblatt's judgment:

[The] progress toward democracy in Iraq is leading Middle Easterners to concentrate on the question of how to build decent governments and decent societies. We can see the results--the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the first seriously contested elections in Egypt, Libya's giving up WMD's, the Jordanian protests against Abu Musab Zarqawi's recent suicide attacks, and even a bit of reform in Saudi Arabia.

Even in Syria, reports the Washington Post's David Ignatius:

People talk politics . . . with a passion I haven't heard since the 1980s in Eastern Europe. They're writing manifestos, dreaming of new political parties, trying to rehabilitate old ones from the 1950s.

And not only in Syria. As the democratic activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who, like Mr. Jumblatt, originally opposed the invasion of Iraq, told Mr. Ignatius's colleague Jim Hoagland:

Those [in the Middle East] who believe in democracy and civil society are finally actors . . . [because the invasion of Iraq] has unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon's 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be midwives.

Nor are such changes confined to the political sphere alone. According to a report in The Economist, a revulsion against terrorism has begun to spread among Muslim clerics, including some who, like the secular Mr. Jumblatt, were only recently applauding its use against Americans:

Moderate Muslim clerics have grown increasingly concerned at the abuse of religion to justify killing. In Saudi Arabia, numerous preachers once famed for their fighting words now advise tolerance and restraint. Even so rigid a defender of suicide attacks against Israel . . . as Yusuf Qaradawi, the star preacher of the popular al-Jazeera satellite channel, denounces bombings elsewhere and calls on the perpetrators to repent.

Zbigniew Brzezinski may be wrongheaded, but he is neither blind nor stupid. Why, then, his willful silence in the face of all these signs of progress? I can only interpret it as the product of a rising panic. No less than the denizens of the mainstream media, he is desperately struggling to salvage a worldview that, like theirs, should have been but was not killed off by 9/11 and that, like theirs, may well suffer a truly mortal blow if the Bush Doctrine passes through the great test of fire it is undergoing in Iraq.

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Mr. Brzezinski's worldview is a syncretistic mix of foreign-policy realism (with its emphasis on stability and the sanctity of national borders) and liberal internationalism (with its unshakable faith in compromise, consensus and international institutions). In this he differs somewhat from another former national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, a Republican who occupied the office under George W. Bush's father and whose own commitment to the realist perspective is pure and unadulterated.

In spite of this difference, the two men are at one in regarding the war in Iraq as a disastrous distraction from the really important business to which we should be attending in the Middle East--namely, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In an article published some months before the invasion and entitled "Don't Attack Saddam," Mr. Scowcroft wrote:

Possibly the most dire consequence [of attacking Saddam] would be the effect in the region. The shared view in the region is that Iraq is principally an obsession of the U.S. The obsession of the region, however, is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If we were seen to be turning our backs on that bitter conflict, there would be an explosion of outrage against us.

Evidently he still holds to this view. So does Mr. Brzezinski, who attacks "the Bush team" for having transformed "a manageable, though serious, challenge of largely regional origin into an international debacle," and who urges us to get out of Iraq, the sooner the better, so that we can shift our focus back to where it really belongs--"the Israeli-Palestinian peace process."

Well, whether the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is truly "the obsession of the region" or, rather, a screen for other things, it certainly is the obsession of Messrs. Brzezinski and Scowcroft, as it is of almost everyone else who looks at the Middle East from the so-called realist perspective and to whom stability is the great desideratum. Even from that perspective, however, the nonstop preoccupation with Israel would seem to be warranted only if the conflict with the Palestinians were the main cause of instability throughout the region.

This is indeed what Messrs. Brzezinski, Scowcroft, and most other members of the realist school believe. (But not Henry Kissinger, the leading realist of them all. Even though he is skeptical about the possibility of democratizing the Middle East, Mr. Kissinger favored the invasion of Iraq and thinks that victory there is essential. Nor does he believe that the war between the Palestinians and Israel is the most important problem in the world, or even in the Middle East.)

Yet the realities to which the realists are so deferential in the abstract make utter nonsense of this idea. Since the birth of Israel in 1948, there have been something like two dozen wars in the Middle East (variously involving Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Iraq) that have had nothing whatever to do with the Jewish state, or with the Palestinians. In one of these alone--the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88--more lives were lost than in all the wars involving Israel put together.

The obsessive animus against Israel goes hand in hand with the overall strategy for dealing with the Middle East that prevailed before 9/11, and to which Messrs. Brzezinski and Scowcroft are still married, heart and soul and mind. The best and most succinct description of that strategy was given by President Bush himself in explaining why 9/11 had driven him to reject it in favor of a radically different approach:

For decades free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy.

And again:

In the past, . . . longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.

We learn from Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker that, when Condoleezza Rice quoted these words to Scowcroft (her former mentor), he responded that the policy Bush was rejecting had actually brought us "50 years of peace." (What, asked James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal, "do you call someone" who can describe the many wars that have been fought in the Middle East in the past five decades as "50 years of peace"? Mr. Taranto's sardonic answer: "A 'realist.' ")

In addition to remaining convinced that the old way of doing things was right, Mr. Scowcroft is utterly disdainful of the new approach being followed by George W. Bush, which (as I like to describe it) is to make the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy. "I believe," he told Jeffrey Goldberg, "that you cannot with one sweep of the hand or the mind cast off thousands of years of history." But the despotisms in the Middle East are not thousands of years old, and they were not created by Allah or the Prophet Muhammad. All of them were established after World War I--that is, less than a century ago--by the British and the French.

This being the case, there is nothing "utopian" about the idea that such regimes--planted with shallow roots by two Western powers--could be uprooted with the help of a third Western power, and that a better political system could be put in their place. And, in fact, this is exactly what has been happening before our very eyes in Iraq. In the span of three short years, Iraq, liberated by the United States from the totalitarian tyranny of Saddam Hussein, has taken one giant step after another toward democratization. Yet Mr. Scowcroft can still assure us that "you're not going to democratize Iraq," and certainly not "in any reasonable time frame."

As with Mr. Brzezinski, so again it seems that nothing else but panic can explain so astonishing a degree of denial.

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Like the mainstream media and the theorists in the academy and the think tanks, the Democratic Party--fearing that it might be frozen out of power for a very long time to come--is also in a panic over the signs that George W. Bush's new approach to the greater Middle East is on the verge of passing the test of Iraq. Hence the veritable hysteria with which the Democrats have recently tried to delegitimize the war: first by claiming (three years after the fact!) that it had begun with a lie, and then by declaring that it was ending in a defeat. Leaning heavily on the turn in public opinion largely brought about by reports in the mainstream media and the lucubrations of the theorists, the Democrats--with the notably honorable exception of Sen. Joseph Lieberman--now joined in by clamoring openly for a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.

A goodly number of these Democrats (party chairman Howard Dean and Rep. Cynthia McKinney, to name only two) are the "Tories" of today, in the sense of having from the very beginning stood openly and unambiguously against the revolution in foreign policy represented by the Bush Doctrine and now being put to the test in Iraq. But a much larger number of Democrats fit more smoothly into Tom Paine's category of "disguised" Tories. These are the congressmen and senators who in their heart of hearts were against the resolution authorizing the president to use force against Saddam Hussein, but who--given the state of public opinion at the time--feared being punished at the polls unless they voted for it. Now, however, with public opinion moving in the other direction, they have been emboldened to "show their heads."

Finally, we have a certain number of Democrats who correspond to "the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots" of the American Revolution. One of them is Rep. John Murtha, who backed the invasion of Iraq because (to give him the benefit of the doubt) he really thought it was the right thing to do, but who has now bought entirely into the view that all is lost and that the only sensible course is to turn tail:

The war in Iraq is . . . a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. . . . Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people, or the Persian Gulf region. . . . Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists, and foreign jihadists. . . . Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring them home.

It seems never to have occurred to Mr. Murtha that talk of this kind could only confuse and demoralize the troops for whose welfare, and for whose sufferings, he expresses such concern. By all accounts, those troops are very proud of what they are accomplishing in Iraq. How then could they not be confounded when a respected congressman--a former Marine, no less--declares that they have been fighting for nothing, nothing whatsoever, and when for saying so he gets a standing ovation from his fellow Democrats? How could they not be demoralized to be told that there is no point in going on because their very presence in Iraq is making things worse for everyone concerned?

And how, by the same token, could talk of this kind fail to give new heart to the Islamofascist terrorists--just when they are on the run? How could they not be delighted to see the elected representatives of the American people carrying on a heated debate in which the only questions at issue are how quickly to bug out of Iraq, and whether to fix a timetable and a deadline? How could they not feel vindicated when, after being surprised by the fierce reaction of the Americans to 9/11, they now behold fresh evidence for believing that Osama bin Laden was right after all when he called us a paper tiger?

On the other hand, if (as the president intended all along, as he reiterated in his great speech of Nov. 30 at Annapolis, and as is prescribed in the recently declassified "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq") American forces are drawn down only at the rate and to the extent that they can be replaced with similar numbers of Iraqi soldiers and policemen fully capable of taking over, the joy now being felt by the Islamofascists will commensurately be replaced by dread. For no one knows better than they that, once up to snuff and on their own, the new Iraqi forces will be less inhibited than the Americans by moral considerations and accordingly much more ruthless in the way they fight.

---

Tom Paine grew so disgusted with "the mean principles that are held by the Tories," with the hypocrisy of the disguised Tories, and with the shrinking from hardship of the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots of 1776-77 that he finally gave up trying to persuade them:

I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world to either their folly or their baseness.

And so, "quitting this class of men . . . who see not the full extent of the evil that threatens them," Paine turned "to those who have nobly stood, and are yet determined to stand the matter out," and rested his hopes on them.

These hopes, we know and thank God for it, were not disappointed. And neither will be the hopes of those today who likewise see "the full extent of the evil that threatens" us; who understand the necessity of the war that our country has been waging against it; who recognize the moral, political, and intellectual boldness of how George W. Bush has chosen to fight this war; and who take pride in the nobility of what the United States, at whose birth Tom Paine assisted, is now, more than 200 years later, battling to achieve in Iraq and, in the fullness of time, in the entire region of which Iraq is so crucial a part.

Mr. Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary and author of 10 books, most recently "The Norman Podhoretz Reader," edited by Thomas L. Jeffers (Free Press, 2004). This article will appear in Commentary's January issue.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Elections -- Iraqi style

What a difference ten months make!

In January, most candidates outside the dominant few parties largely eschewed campaigning, fearing they could be kidnapped or assassinated. Now, even long shots are getting into the act. One day this week, National Democratic Institute instructors explained get-out-the-vote techniques to a dozen members of the Free Iraq Gathering, a new coalition that "probably won't get many more votes than you see in that room," according to an institute employee.

Spoiled brat politics

Thomas Sowell goes straight to heart of things with his op-ed about asserting one's rights by depriving others of theirs. Here's a taste (emphasis added):

The reason there is a legal issue is that a federal law has been passed, saying that colleges and universities that forbid military recruiters from coming on campus are no longer eligible to receive federal money.

Academics are outraged. They see this law as a violation of their freedom -- including their right to violate their students' freedom. It is classic spoiled brat politics, based on the idea that what I want overrides what you want.

He also delves into property rights. Recommended reading.

Corruption

Jack Kelly has a post in his blog about Randy "Duke" Cunningham's guilty plea to accepting bribes.

He also included a column about bipartisan systemic corruption in our federal government and how best to overcome it. I've included that part of his post in the extended entry.

BY JACK KELLY

Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Cal, pled guilty Monday to accepting $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors, and resigned from Congress. He faces up to ten years in prison when he is sentenced in February.

Perhaps Duke will share a cell with Rep. Bob Ney, R-OH, identified as "Representative #1" in the plea agreement made Nov. 21st by lobbyist Michael Scanlon, who was press secretary to then House GOP Whip Tom Delay, R-Tex.

Scanlon pled guilty to bribing a congressman, and to defrauding Indian tribes of $19.7 million. He is the first domino to fall in the Justice department's investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, another associate of Rep. Delay. There will be more.

"Investigators are looking at half a dozen members of Congress, current and former senior Hill aides, a former deputy secretary of the Interior, and Abramoff's former lobbying colleagues," said the Washington Post.

Ney was the only lawmaker mentioned in Mr. Scanlon's plea agreement, which listed a series of campaign contributions and gifts made "in exchange for a series of official acts."

Democrats have been claiming that corruption in Congress is a new, and uniquely Republican, phenomenon. But among nearly three dozen lawmakers who lobbied the Interior Department to block a license for an Indian casino in Louisiana after receiving contributions from rival tribes represented by Abramoff were many Democrats, among them Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, and Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, the senior Democrat on the committee investigating Abramoff.

Democrats, among them President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, accepted illegal contributions from the Chinese government in 1996.
But there is no question that Republicans, who were swept into control of the House of Representatives in 1994 largely because of public outrage over the House banking and House post office scandals, have become what they came to Washington to clean up.

Partisans argue the other party is inherently more corrupt. But the problem is bipartisan, and systemic. Power corrupts. The greater the power is, and the longer that it is held, the more likely it is to be abused.

Systemic problems can be solved only by changing the system. There are three reforms that could break the stranglehold lobbyists have on our politics.

The first is to limit the tenure of members of Congress. If senators were restricted to two consecutive six year terms, and representatives to six consecutive two year terms, much mischief could be avoided.

The second is to give to the president the line item veto, a power currently enjoyed by all but seven state governors. Lobbyists would not go to such great lengths to have pork inserted into appropriations bills if the president could remove it with the stroke of a pen.

Both of these reforms would require constitutional amendments, and neither are sufficient to make a huge dent in the culture of corruption that pervades Washington.

Most important is genuine campaign finance reform. Special interest groups derive their power from the dependence lawmakers in both parties have on them to obtain the funds they require to win re-election. Only when politicians have been weaned from this dependency will there be a substantial reduction in political corruption.

The McCain-Feingold law and earlier attempts at campaign finance reform have faltered mostly because they have wrongly defined the problem as too much money in politics, when the real problem is where the money comes from, and the strings attached to it.

Candidates for federal office should be permitted to accept campaign contributions only from citizens of the United States who are registered to vote in the state from which they are seeking election, or from the political party to which they belong.

There should be limits on how much an individual can give, because no one should be able to own their own congressman. But they should be higher than they are at present.

A form of public financing of elections is required, because political parties cannot constitutionally be forbidden to accept special interest money except as a quid pro quo for receipt of federal funds.

Public outrage is building. If Republicans don't get serious about corruption, we can't be certain the next Congress will be more honest. We can be certain it will be more Democratic.

Our man Bolton

I am so glad that Mr. Bolton made it to the UN so he can properly and firmly represent U.S. interests.

Following intense US pressure, the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday issued an unprecedented condemnation of Monday's Hizbullah attacks on northern Israel.

This condemnation - slamming Hizbullah by name for "acts of hatred" - marked the first time the Security Council has ever reprimanded Hizbullah for cross-border attacks on Israel. The condemnation followed by two days a failed attempt to get a condemnation issued on Monday, the day of the attack, when Algeria came out against any mention of Hizbullah in the statement.

When asked what changed from Monday to Wednesday, one diplomatic official replied: "John Bolton," a reference to the US ambassador to the UN. Bolton lobbied vigorously for the passage of the statement.

Wanted: Statesmen

OpinionJournal has an op-ed up about our Congress of Invertebrates.

I've copied the entire article into the extended entry.

A Bridge Too Far
Coburn beats Stevens by a PR knockout.

Monday, November 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

Congress limped out of town last week for its Thanksgiving recess, and just in the nick of time. With its Iraq duck-and-cover, the failure to extend expiring tax cuts, and the refusal to control spending, the Members were doing more damage to the republic every day they stayed around.

Amid the carnage, however, there was one small triumph last week: Senate Appropriations powerhouse Ted Stevens decided to pull funding for the infamous $320 million "Bridge to Nowhere" in his home state of Alaska. For those joining this story in progress, the proposed project would have connected Ketchikan, Alaska with remote Gravina Island (population 50).

---

The bridge had become the poster child for Republican fiscal extravagance and the object of justified ridicule across the political spectrum. Ron Utt, fiscal analyst at the Heritage Foundation, notes that the construction costs were so enormous that it would have been cheaper for taxpayers to purchase a yacht for every Gravina family than to build the bridge. One recent poll found that more Americans know about the Bridge to Nowhere than know who their local Congressman is. Which, given Congress's 30% approval rating, is probably the way most Members prefer it these days.

The one hero of this episode is Senator Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), who sponsored an amendment to block funding for the bridge and use the money to repair vital bridges on the Gulf Coast destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Stevens erupted on the Senate floor and threatened to quit if the measure passed. The vote failed. However, Mr. Stevens threw in the towel last Tuesday, announcing that he was taking this "drastic action" because his state had been "so unfairly maligned in the national press" in recent weeks.

We readily admit to being one of the leading maligners, though of Congress, not of Alaskans. Mr. Stevens has been in an arms race with Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia to see whose state could win the distinction of pork capital of the nation.

Mr. Stevens has pulled way ahead, with Alaskans ranking first in the nation in pork at $985 per resident and receiving about $5 of federal highway money for every dollar they pay in gas taxes. So even without the Bridge to Nowhere, Alaskans will do just fine in the return-on-taxes-paid department. In any case, Mr. Stevens isn't redirecting the bridge's $320 million to New Orleans. The deal is that the money stays in Alaska but will be spent on other road projects.

---

It would be nice to think that this bridge humiliation would teach Congress about the folly of spending earmarks. The uproar has done enormous damage to the GOP majority's public image, which is of course why Mr. Stevens blew up his bridge. But, alas, apparently this is merely a symbolic and tactical spending retreat. Late last week, GOP House leaders suffered another defeat on the floor when a health and education spending bill failed to pass. One reason? Twenty or so GOP Members were angry that their special projects had been stripped from the legislation to save money. The bridge that these folks are building is one to being called "Mr. Ranking Member."

Terrorists' rights

Thomas Sowell puts the rights of terrorists in proper perspective. He's an excerpt:

There is no penalty for false claims but potentially deadly consequences for letting international terrorists tie up our legal system by exercising rights granted to American citizens and now thoughtlessly extended to people who are not American citizens and who are bent on killing American citizens and destroying American society.

After decades of ignoring the fact that rights and responsibilities go together, it was perhaps inevitable that an under-educated and easily confused generation should include some who do not understand that the rights granted to captured troops by the Geneva Convention apply to those who have accepted the terms of the Geneva Convention. It does not apply to people who are not troops and who have blatantly violated the whole framework of that convention.

For more than two centuries there has been a tendency on the political left, here and overseas, to make wrong-doers look like victims rather than people who are victimizing others. So it was perhaps inevitable that some would extend this attitude from criminals to terrorists.

Highly recommended.

How do you lose a war?

Ralph Peters, over at theNew York Post has the answer to that question: just quit. And he also goes into some detail about the betrayal of America and Iraq by our Senators and Congressmen.

The irresponsibility of the Democrats on Capitol Hill is breathtaking. (How can an honorable man such as Joe Lieberman stay in that party?) Not one of the critics of our efforts in Iraq -- not one -- has described his or her vision for Iraq and the Middle East in the wake of a troop withdrawal. Not one has offered any analysis of what the terrorists would gain and what they might do. Not one has shown respect for our war dead by arguing that we must put aside our partisan differences and win.

There's plenty I don't like about the Bush administration. Its domestic policies disgust me, and the Bushies got plenty wrong in Iraq. But at least they'll fight. The Dems are ready to betray our troops, our allies and our country's future security for a few House seats.

Surrender is never a winning strategy.

You should read the whole thing.

[Hat tip to Instapundit.]

'Exit strategy'

Mark Steyn comments on the Senate's public departure from reality. And he's taking no prisoners:

What does Rockefeller believe, really? I know what Bush believes: He thought Saddam should go in 2002 and today he's glad he's gone, as am I. I know what, say, Michael Moore believes: He wanted to leave Saddam in power in 2002, and today he thinks the "insurgents" are the Iraqi version of America's Minutemen. But what do Rockefeller and Reid and Kerry believe deep down? That voting for the war seemed the politically expedient thing to do in 2002 but that they've since done the math and figured that pandering to the moveon.org crowd is where the big bucks are? If Bush is the new Hitler, these small hollow men are the equivalent of those grubby little Nazis whose whining defense was, "I was only obeying orders. I didn't really mean all that strutting tough-guy stuff." And, before they huff, "How dare you question my patriotism?", well, yes, I am questioning your patriotism -- because you're failing to meet the challenge of the times. Thanks to you, Iraq is a quagmire -- not in the Sunni Triangle, where U.S. armed forces are confident and effective, but on the home front, where soft-spined national legislators have turned the war into one almighty Linguini Triangle.

Recommended reading.

Standing up for what's right

Senator John McCain has an opinion piece up about the foolish Senate amendment that was passed this week calling for a drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq in 2006. Here's an excerpt:

The Senate has responded to the millions who braved bombs and threats to vote, who put their faith and trust in America and their government, by suggesting that our No. 1 priority is to bring our people home.

We have told insurgents that their violence does grind us down, that their horrific acts might be successful. But these are precisely the wrong messages. Our exit strategy in Iraq is not the withdrawal of our troops, it is victory.

Americans may not have been of one mind when it came to the decision to topple Saddam Hussein. But, though some disagreed, I believe that nearly all now wish us to prevail.

Because the stakes there are so high -- higher even than those in Vietnam -- our friends and our enemies need to hear one message: America is committed to success, and we will win this war.

He's got it right.

Recommended (requires free registration).

Nadir

Rick Moran has some pointed things to say about how the war in Iraq is being conducted at home in the USA.

In just a few weeks, the people of Iraq will hold an election under their newly minted constitution that, on paper, is a marvel of compromise and idealism. What kind of government emerges from these elections may not be very satisfying to the United States. But that is not the point. It will be the kind of government that the Iraqi people want. And that is what more than 2,000 American boys and girls have died trying to establish; a democratically elected government set in the heart of jihad territory. The Iraqis are about ready to spit in the eye of Osama bin Laden and all our weak kneed, faint of heart "nervous nellies" can spout about is how much of a failure the war has been and how we should leave these courageous people to the tender mercies of al Zarqawi and his Merry Band of Beheaders.

I sure wish I had said that. Go read the rest. It's well worth it -- even if you disagree.

Polls

Brent Bozell, over at Townhall.com asks a very good question:

Doesn't Bush deserve some measure of credit for how or why the country has not been attacked again on his watch?

You should read the rest . . .

Who's lying?

Go ahead and Google "Clinton Iraq 1998". You'll find numerous (3,700,000 on my search) references to speeches by former President Clinton, many past and present Senators (several of whom are calling President Bush a liar), the Iraq Liberation Act -- H.R. 4655, and much more . . .

Here, and here are a couple of other articles you can read, too.

Do the research yourself, and then make up your own mind about whether or not we were lied to -- and by whom . . .

An open letter to the Dems

Senator John Cornyn has some good points to make in this letter to his Democrat friends. Here is a taste:

Democrats, in the Senate and elsewhere, believe they’ve hit upon a winning political strategy: Telling anyone who will listen that the administration has manipulated intelligence and has exaggerated the threat. But that line of attack itself is the manipulation of facts; a complete revision of recent history: Recall that only a few years ago Democrats joined Republicans in a bipartisan acknowledgment that Saddam Hussein posed a grave threat to the world.

In fact, it was the Senate that unanimously passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 which called for supporting efforts to overthrow Saddam Hussein. And it was President Clinton who so eloquently described the threat posed by Hussein and the consequences of inaction when he said:

“Heavy as they are, the costs of action must be weighed against the price of inaction. If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond, we will face a far greater threat in the future. Saddam will strike again at his neighbors; he will make war against his own people. And mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them.�

The rest is worth reading.

Liar!

The L.A. Times has a succinct op-ed out about who was really lying about WMD in the Plame case. Here's an excerpt:

Making the best of a weak hand, Democrats argued that the case was not about petty-ante perjury but, as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid put it, "about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the president." The problem here is that the one undisputed liar in this whole sordid affair doesn't work for the administration. In his attempts to turn his wife into an antiwar martyr, Joseph C. Wilson IV has retailed more whoppers than Burger King.

The Senate Intelligence Committee did come to some conclusions concerning WMD in Iraq -- and Wilson's trip report, in fact, did nothing to refute other intelligence regarding Iraq's quest for uranium.

The panel's report found that, far from discrediting the Iraq-Niger uranium link, Wilson actually provided fresh details about a 1999 meeting between Niger's prime minister and an Iraqi delegation. Beyond that, he had not supplied new information. According to the panel, intelligence analysts "did not think" that his findings "clarified the story on the reported Iraq-Niger uranium deal." In other words, Wilson had hardly exposed as fraudulent the "16 words" included in the 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." In fact, the British government, in its own post-invasion review of intelligence, found that this claim was "well founded."

It's a short article, but it makes some good points. Recommended.

Porkbusters

There is a movement afoot to help our federal congressional representatives to return to a more fiscally conservative approach to legislation. In the blogosphere, an aspect of this effort is to point out to Senators and Congressmen the pork that they have inserted into legislation like the recently passed transportation bill, and urge them to pull it. Thus, the effort earned the moniker "porkbusters".

Last week, Senator Tom Coburn and six other Senators (Sam Brownback, Jim DeMint, John Ensign, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and John Sununu), styling themselves as the "Fiscal Watch Team", released an "offset package" aimed at identifying budget cuts to pay for hurricane relief. The key provision in the bill for our purposes is that it would elminate all "offsets" ( i.e., pork) in the highway bill --- wiping away a vast chunk of pork in a single stroke.

You can read more about this effort at the Truth Laid Bear.

I support the Fiscal Watch Team Offset Package. And I urge you to do the same. We have got to reign in the dangerously irresponsible spending that has taken hold in Washington, D.C.

Oh, one last thing. It is safe to come out now . . . my 'political activism moment' is over . . .

Low point

Michael Barone sums up President Bush's week last week -- and it wasn't as bad as we thought it would be. Here's an excerpt:

So on the whole, it was a successful week -- successful in that it gives Bush' administration the opportunity to rise above the low point that it has hit since Katrina's waters smashed through the levees in New Orleans two months ago.

But people must still perform. Conditions in Iraq need to continue to improve. Bernanke may be tested in a financial crisis in his first months, as Greenspan was when the stock market crashed in October 1987. Bush must pick a Supreme Court nominee who seems to fulfill his campaign promises and who can be confirmed by the Senate. And Bush, Rove and others in the administration need to come up with some fresh domestic policies by State of the Union time next year.

There's more.

Leadership

Jason Riley, senior editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, has a serious op-ed about civil rights leadership -- past and present.

It's all in the extended entry.

When the Leaders
Of Civil Rights
Were Civilized
We will miss Rosa Parks.

BY JASON L. RILEY
Friday, October 28, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

In the last paragraph on the last page of his thoughtful Penguin Lives biography of Rosa Parks, the historian Douglas Brinkley writes: "Finally, according to Rosa Parks there are three autobiographies that all Americans should read and that helped shape her worldview." The first two--Booker T. Washington's "Up From Slavery" and W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Souls of Black Folk"--would, or at least should, make most such lists. But Parks's third choice, James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man," caught my attention, and not just because it isn't an autobiography but in fact a novella told in the first person.

Johnson, who died in a car accident in 1938 at the age of 67, was among the most prominent and accomplished black Americans of his day. An irrepressible polymath, he managed to distinguish himself in politics, diplomacy, journalism, literature, the arts and civil rights. But to the extent that he is remembered at all today, it is primarily for "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" (aka "The Negro National Anthem"), a song he wrote in 1900 to commemorate Lincoln's birthday. It was an instant hit and remains a black choir staple more than a century later.

---

Johnson's real legacy, however, is his work in the first third of the 20th century, leading up to that famous act of civil disobedience on a bus in Jim Crow Alabama that turned a Montgomery-branch NAACP bookkeeper into a cultural icon and kick-started what would become the modern civil-rights movement.

Starting in 1913, Johnson was editorial-page editor of the New York Age, a black weekly, and his widely disseminated commentaries on racial violence and segregation helped raise much needed awareness. Before becoming the NAACP's first black head in 1920, he was responsible for the formation of new chapters throughout the U.S. Inside of four years, he quadrupled the number. In 1917, foreshadowing tactics that Martin Luther King would use decades later, Johnson organized a silent protest parade down New York City's Fifth Avenue in response to the frequent lynchings and race riots of the period. Some ten thousand blacks participated.

That Rosa Parks cited Johnson as an inspiration along with giants like Washington and Du Bois tells us something about her deep appreciation of him. But it's also a reminder of Parks's dignified brand of social activism. Like Johnson, Parks recalls a time when the NAACP was an important institution staffed by serious people tackling real problems faced by a marginalized race.

While laboring under the thumb of policies enacted to preserve racial inequality, these pioneers consciously compiled a large store of near-universal respect for a movement whose goals couldn't have been more principled. The passing of Parks, and what she represented, leaves us with black leaders who seem to excel in cheapening this legacy when they're not squandering it altogether. .

---

The NAACP's idea of civil discourse in the 21st century is Kweisi Mfume accusing President Bush of "divide and conquer" tactics "when it comes to black organizations and black people and black thinking." It's Julian Bond comparing Republicans to Nazis and the Taliban and asserting that there is a right-wing conspiracy against blacks "operating out of the United States Department of Justice."

Harlem Rep. Charlie Rangel calls President Bush "our Bull Connor," the notorious police commissioner in Alabama who turned dogs and fire hoses on civil-rights demonstrators in 1963. The remark prompts a correction from Major Owens, a fellow member of the Congressional Black Caucus, who insists that the president is "more diabolical" than Connor was. When the rhetoric of so-called elder statesmen is materially no different from hip-hopper Kanye West's, it might be a sign that the movement is in trouble.

Or that it's irrelevant.

An America where blacks run Merrill Lynch, American Express and the State Department no longer needs civil-rights activism of the Rosa Parks and James Weldon Johnson variety, and hasn't for decades. Thanks in large part to their diligence and sacrifices, the battle for legal equality has been fought and won. Blacks still face social and economic challenges, but these result mainly from self-inflicted cultural wounds, not a manifestly unjust society.

The current crop of opportunistic pretenders isn't ready to acknowledge this reality--just ask Bill Cosby--but as more and more black Americans reach the middle class and beyond, it's becoming self-evident.

Mr. Riley is a senior editorial writer at The Wall Street Journal.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Loyalty

The American Thinker has a good article about loyalty in wartime. Here's an excerpt:

According to the latest polls, barely 40% of the country approves of the way that President Bush is conducting the war in Iraq. But when asked if we should pull our troops out before the job of securing the country and helping the Iraqis achieve a stable, democratic government is complete, fully two thirds of Americans say no. This slap in the face to the leftist narrative of how the American people see the war in Iraq seems to have been lost on this past weekend's partygoers in Washington whose speakers continued to insist that the majority of the people opposed the war and wished the troops to come home.

Leave it to the left to never let the truth stand in the way of a good old fashioned Soviet-style propaganda campaign.

This just further illustrates to me that we cannot continue to look at things as being either black or white -- there are so many shades of gray that it is ludicrous for someone to assert one extreme or another. And it is just as ludicrous for someone to believe that assertion . . .

It's a good read. I recommend it.

Question

So is anyone else weary of, yet amused by, the Harriet Miers kerfluffle?

"Our nation needs two parties . . ."

". . . that believe in America as a great country."

Michael Barone has a good post up about the failure of the Democrats to move toward the political center, and what that means to the country.

And it's not a good thing . . .

Ronnie Earle's crusade

Before making up your mind that Tom Delay is guilty, read Jason's post over at Generation Why?.