I really love chain e-mails from jingoist war mongers.

It’s always exciting to hear what latest arguments for squandering our awesome and virtuous military might are floating around out there. It allows me to keep a finger on the fear pulse of the body politic, too, and see if there’s something to be genuinely concerned about - from either side; foreign or domestic.

And foremost, it allows me to flex the old research guns and fire off a few better-informed salvos at guys with more letters behind their name than me.

In this case, a friend of mine asked some people on his chain e-mail list whether the historical assertions of one Mr. Kraft were true. I replied, since many were not.

I tried to stay away from voicing opinion. At least I held out to the end.

See for yourself:

XXXXX- wrote:
SOME OF YOU ARE NOT OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER THAT NEARLY EVERY FAMILY IN AMERICA WAS GROSSLY AFFECTED BY WW II .. MOST OF YOU DON’T REMEMBER THE RATIONING OF MEAT, SHOES, GASOLINE, AND SUGAR. NO TIRES FOR OUR AUTOMOBILES,AND A SPEED LIMIT OF 35 MILES AN HOUR ON THE ROAD, NOT TO MENTION, NO NEW AUTOMOBILES. READ THIS AND THINK ABOUT HOW WE WOULD REACT TO BEING TAKEN OVER BY FOREIGNERS IN 2008.

This is largely true. Gas rationing went into effect for seven months, nationwide, in 1942. This article covers the History of Gas Rationing Laws in Ohio, and discusses that occurence.

This is an EXCELLENT essay. Well thought out and presented. Please read it all and think seriously about our future here on earth. It is critical.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Historical Significance

Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat. The Nazis had sunk more than 400 British ships in their convoys between England and America taking food and war materials.

Pretty true. Around 3,500 Allied merchant ships were lost during the course of the entire war with Germany. Also, bear in mind that this essay was likely written back in late 2004, which was 63 years after the entry of the United States in WW2.

At that time the US was in an isolationist, pacifist mood, and most Americans wanted nothing to do with the European or the Asian war.

Not exactly true. Though US opinion had been isolationist for awhile, things had shifted dramatically by the beginning of 1941 - nearly a full year before Pearl Harbor. To quote:

“…in January 1941, after the Fall of France, and also the founding of the Tripartite Pact, which was clearly aimed against the United States, the question “Should we keep out of war, or aid Britain, even at the risk of war?”, AID BRITAIN got 68%”

This is proven by polls cited in Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight Series”.

Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on Germany, who had not yet attacked us. It was a dicey thing. We had few allies.

Not true. Republican legislators largely maintained opposition to going to war with Germany. Even the Democrats were hard pressed to advocate such an expansion of the war. Hitler forced the issue by declaring war on us - not the other way around - on December 11th. It was, indeed, a dicey thing for the Reich, considering they were busy losing a war on three fronts.

Again, we had war declared on us by Germany.

France was not an ally, as the Vichy government of France quickly aligned itself with its German occupiers. Germany was certainly not an ally, as Hitler was intent on setting up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was not an ally, as it was well on its way to owning and controlling all of Asia. Together, Japan and Germany! had long-range plans of invading Canada and Mexico, as launching pads to get into the United States over our northern and southern borders, after they finished gaining control of Asia and Europe.

No real evidence exists to support the notion that Germany had serious plans to invade the United States - or North America. They were pretty bad at even scrambling together invasion plans to attack Britain’s shores, “Operation Sealion,” because Germany always expected the UK would sue for peace, or at least talk about a negotiated armistice. No dice. Japan did, in fact, invade Alaska - attacking the Aleutian islands and holding them with mixed success.

America’s only allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and Russia. That was about it. All of Europe, from Norway to Italy (except Russia in the East) was already under the Nazi heel.

China was also a large and significant ally. They were the main focus of Japan’s Army effort, and a major drain on Japanese forces. Around 3,200,000
Japanese were in China at any one time, and the Japanese recorded up to 1.9 million casualties (of all kinds).

Let’s not forget their contribution, nor that the Japanese were also actively fighting the UK in Burma at the time.

The US was certainly not prepared for war. The US had drastically downgraded most of its military forces after WW I because of the depression, so that at the outbreak of WW II, Army units were training with broomsticks, because they didn’t have guns, and cars with “tank” painted on the doors, because they didn’t have real tanks. A huge chunk of our Navy had just been sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor.

The broomstick and “tank” cars were during the 30s - Great Depression, isolationism, populism - but things had turned around by the beginning of WW2.

Remember, we started the draft up in a big way in 1940, expecting that we’d need a massive army. The production we began, with Roosevelt and Marshall’s foresight, was just beginning to bear fruit in 1942.

We might not have been primed for a fight, but we had plenty of means to engage in one.

Britain had already gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of $600 million in gold bullion in the Bank of England (that was actually the property of Belgium ) given by Belgium to England to carry on the war, when Belgium was overrun by Hitler (a little known fact).

Actually, Belgium surrendered after one day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans bombed Brussels into rubble the next day just to prove they could .

Not true, again.

The Germans did bomb Brussels, it’s true, but I think the author refers to the truly tragic and unnecessary bombing of Rotterdam. Brussels was hit, but not carpet bombed like Rotterdam.

That horrible event took place on the day of the surrender of Belgium, and was regarded, even then, even by the Germans, as a mistake. Confusion of command, Dutch stalling tactics and the fog of war led to this atrocity.

Britain had already been holding out for two years in the face of staggering losses and the near decimation of! its Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being overrun by Germany, only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking the Brit’s were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later. Hitler, first turned his attention to Russia, in the late summer of 1940, at a time when England was on the verge of collapse.

Kind of. Hitler didn’t go to war with the USSR until mid-summer, 1941. His war with Britain in the meantime was largely one of air and sea - and in the colonies like North Africa - because, as Operation Sealion above notes, he was unprepared for the UK sticking out the war.

Ironically, Russia saved America’s butt by putting up a desperate fight for two years, until the US got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany .

Pretty true. Our politicians were eager to get into the fight, but cooler heads - and British urging - prevailed, and we didn’t deploy Army troops against Germany until nearly a year after Pearl Harbor.

Russia lost something like 24,000,000 people in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow alone . .. 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than a 1,000,000 soldiers.

No. Sorry. I do love touting the sacrifice of the USSR - as many as 37 million, likely around 27 million, dead over the course of the war, if one counts the effects of the Holocaust and the counter-insurgency programs of Germany - but 24 million didn’t perish in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow.

Those numbers above are just made up.

Here are the real ones.

Had Russia surrendered, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire war effort against the Brit’s, then America. If that had happened, the Nazis could possibly have won the war.

All of this has been brought out to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things. Now, we find ourselves at another! one of those key moments in history.

There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants, and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world .

The Jihadist, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs — they believe that Islam, a radically conservative form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world. To them, all who do not bow to their will of thinking should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated . They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, and purge the world of Jews . This is their mantra. (goal)

This statement applies to some of the core of al-Qaeda, but not to most militant Islamists. Bin Ladin is a Wahabbist with a stated goal of world domination. Then again, he has no real plan for this goal.

Other forms of violent militants include:
* Nationalist Shia Muslims (like Hezbollah, the Iraqi ruling Dawah Party, and Iran) who have regional dominance as their goal.
* Extra-nationalist Sunni Muslims (like the Saudi operatives fighting the Shia in Lebanon and those fighting the Russians in Chechnya) who have “defense of the faith” as their goal.
* Opportunist Sunni Muslims (like the Taliban) who use the faith to take control of otherwise factious lands.

There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East — for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation, but it is not yet known which side will win — the Inquisitors, or the Reformationists.

If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadist, will control the Middle East, the OPEC oil, and the US, European, and Asian economies.

The Wahabbists already do control the largest share of oil currently running in the Middle East - the Saudis are Wahabbists, and their state is administered by Islamic law.

The USA counts them chief among their allies, though of course, al-Qaeda’s money and banking is all handled by Saudi Arabia, and 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi.

This is not to incriminate all Saudis, but to note that there is a difference between even the puritanical Wahabbis and jihadists.

The techno-industrial economies will be at the mercy of OPEC — not an OPEC dominated by the educated, rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadist. Do you want gas in your car? Do you want heating oil next winter? Do you want the dollar to be worth anything? You had better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.

If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims, who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions, live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away. A moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.

We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda and the Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. We can’t do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the battle at a time and place of our choosing . . in Iraq. Not in New York, not in London, or Paris or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we are doing two important things.

(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam was a terrorist! Saddam was a weapon of mass destruction, responsible for the deaths of probably more than a 1,000,000 Iraqis and 2,000,000 Iranians.

Try around 213,255 Iranians. Not 2,000,000. And slightly more - around 350,000 - Iraqis. That’s in the Iran-Iraq War.

Bear in mind that the US deliberately supported both sides in that war, in the hopes of extending it so that both Iran and Iraq would be weakened. We weren’t so fond of either of them. That’s why we gave Saddam advanced weaponry, didn’t object to his WMD programs at the time, and at the same time, traded arms to Iran (Iran-Contra).

The sanctions levelled against Saddam to discourage his recuperation of WMD programs after the Gulf War may have led to the deaths of around a million Iraqis, but those are projections. Also, Saddam’s ties with terrorism were largely limited to paying money to the families of Sunni suicide bombers in Palestine - something Saudi Arabian nobles do too.

(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle. We are killing bad people, and the ones we get there, we won’t have to get here. We also have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed.

The central assertion of this article - that the Iraq war limits, rather than expands, Islamic radicalism and militant activity - is highly debatable. Most sources (CIA, RAND corporation, Pentagon) believe the contrary is true.

One fact remains: The casualty counts don’t support the author’s assertion about killing the “bad guys.”

We have killed at least 16,500 insurgents. Al-Qaeda claims 4,000 of those, as of two years ago.

But various terrorists and our own soldiers have killed at least nearly ten times that many civilians. Ten times would be 151,000 - the lowest count. The highest by a legitimate source is over a million Iraqis killed because of the chaos caused by our invasion.

WW II, the war with the Japanese and German Nazis, really began with a “whimper” in 1928. It did not begin with Pearl Harbor. It began with the Japanese invasion of China. It was a war for fourteen years before the US joined it. It officially ended in 1945 — a 17-year war — and was followed by another decade of US occupation in Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own again . a 27-year war.

Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, and China in 1937.

WW II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year’s GDP — adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion dollars. WW II cost America more than 400,000 soldiers killed in action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in action.

Most estimates say, adjusted for inflation, it would have cost around $5 trillion. It did cost the US $306 billion. The MIA numbers are apochryphal.
The KIA is accurate.

The Iraq war has, so far, cost the United States about $160,000,000,000 which is roughly what the 9/11 terrorist attack cost New York. It has also cost about 4,000 American lives, which is roughly equivalent to lives that the Jihad killed (within the United States) in the 9/11 terrorist attack .

Not true. Iraq war costs are $500 billion and climbing, by about $2 billion a week, according to a Congressional Research Survey.

It’s hard to estimate the cost of the 9-11 attacks, financially, as most of it was to the stock market. Relief costs were, at most, in double-digit billions.

The cost of not fighting and winning WW II would have been unimaginably greater — a world dominated by Japanese Imperialism and German Nazism .

This is not a 60-Minutes TV show, or a 2-hour movie in which everything comes out okay . The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly. It always has been, and probably always will be.

The bottom line is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away if we ignore it.

If the US can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we have an ally, like England, in the Middle East, a platform, from which we can work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East. The history of the world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at the gates to conquer the world.

The Iraq War is merely another battle in this ancient and never ending war. Now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons. Unless somebody prevents them from getting them! ..

We have four options:

1 . We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.

2 . We can fight the Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons (which may be as early as next year, if Iran’s progress on nuclear weapons is what Iran claims it is).

Four years from then, at earliest.

3 We can surrender to the Jihad an! d accept its dominance in the Middle East now; in Europe in the next few years or decades, and ultimately in America .

OR

4 . We can stand down now, and pick up the fight later, when the Jihad is more widespread and better armed, perhaps after the Jihad has dominated France and Germany and possibly most of the rest of Europe. It will, of course, be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier.

If you oppose this war, I hope you like the idea that your children, or grandchildren, may live in an Islamic America under the Mullahs and the Sharia, an America that resembles Iran today.

The history of the world is the history of civilization clashes, cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society and civilization should be like, and the most determined always win.

Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win. The pacifists always lose, because the anti-pacifists kill them .

I would argue that the outcome of the Cold War does not bear this out. The Soviets were willing to be quite ruthless indeed.

Remember, perspective is everything, and America’s schools teach too little history for perspective to be clear, especially in the young American mind.

The Cold War lasted from about 1947, at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989; forty-two years!

Europe spent the first half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting Germany !

Europe fought Napoleon for about 15 years. The assertion about Germany is rather silly, as sides were switching dramatically during that period.

World War II began in 1928, lasted 17 years, plus a ten year occupation, and the US still has troops in Germany and Japan .. World War II resulted in the death of more than 50,000,000 people, maybe more than 100,000,000 people, depending on which estimates you accept.

The US has taken more than 3,000 killed in action in Iraq. The US took more than 4,000 killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944, the first day of the Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism.

In WW II, the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week — for four years. Most of the individual battles of WW II lost more Americans than the entire Iraq war hasdone so far.

The stakes are at least as high . ! A world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms . . or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law).

It’s difficult to understand why the average American does not grasp this. They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis.

“Peace Activists” always seem to demonstrate here in America, where it’s safe.

Why don’t we see Peace Activist demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, in the places that really need peace activism the most? I’ll tell you why! They would be killed!

Likely imprisoned.

The liberal mentality is supposed to favor human rights, civil rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc., but if the Jihad wins, wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end of civil rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc.

Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy!

The central argument of the essay seems to be that we need to be more ruthless than the enemy to win. That’s rather alarming, and depraved, considering that it was al-Qaeda’s ruthlessness that was a major factor in motivating the Sunni nationalists - terrorists, yes - to join us against al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Furthermore, the essay suffers from two major flaws in comparison:

One, comparing the “jihadists” to the Axis powers. The Axis powers were just that - governmental powers we could unseat and replace with our military presence. Terrorists aren’t. They’re customarily civilians who hide among civilian populations and strike out; kind of like politically-motivated criminals.

Furthermore, as I noted, there are a variety of Islamic terrorists. Many fight one another. Recently, we began giving money to the Saudis through the CIA, to give to Al-Qaeda, to fight Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon. For each different group, there is a different objective. All are mostly composed of middle-class, young males with wealthy money and influence brokers from places like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan supporting them.

So, the notion that we can consider the war on terror to be like World War Two is thoroughly foolish. One involves states fighting states, the other involves a state fighting several non-state actors spread throughout several countries.

The second failure of comparison is the equivalence of expense. World War Two saw us raise millions of men under arms, ship them across two oceans and have a supply train that, even though it was spread over several continents, was flooding with materiel like planes, trucks and gas. We annihilated, occupied and rebuilt numerous large nations. Now that’s a pay-off.

For a lesser but very significant cost, the Iraq War has allowed us to maintain a presence of about 160,000 troops in a single country. Said country has not been rebuilt, or secured by our forces. It has not had closed borders. Fighting still goes on. And, until recently, our troops had inadequate armor and equipment in some cases.

In short, World War Two - good investment. Iraq War - disastrous investment. Beware of comparing inapplicable metrics: We dropped as many munitions in Vietnam as we did on all of Europe in World War Two, and what good did it do us?

Lastly, I leave you with this consideration:

Do we /want/ to turn the War on Terror into World War Two?

Do we want to sacrifice that much? Do we want to make the stakes that dire? Because let me tell you, the reason why we were able to pull it off was because of the extent to which we sacrificed.

So before one considers Kraft’s call to battle, consider this:

Do you want America to have to marshal a force of millions of men? Turn all its industry toward creating the machines of war? Ration dramatically so that we can invade, dominate and reshape populations that - unlike Germany and Japan - are among the most historically disobedient and unruly?

If so, anchors aweigh for a lot of nations who we’ve been calling our allies for a long, long time now.

–Matt Funk
B.A. Political Science (USC); M.F.A. Professional Writing (USC)
www.matthewfunk.net

The situation in Iraq may seem a muddle, but only when viewed through the lens of expectations. If one views it as a failed military venture that can only produce decay, recent developments will seem unbelievable. If the assumption is that it is a noble expedition wherein a gain in one field means a gain overall, it will seem worthy of general optimism. With either perceptive, perplexity will linger, because neither grasps the simplicity of the situation - that Iraq, like any state or any conflict, has both revolutionary victories and cataclysmic inherent problems.

Here is a clear picture of what may seem mixed results.

The Surge Strategy is beginning to attain its initial aims. The spike in violence that resulted from increased, aggressive contact with the enemy has left their casualties mounting while ours have begun to level off. We effectively secure ground, while still maintaining an aggressive posture against enemy strongholds that the new focus away from Sunni extremists in general has permitted. At the risk of sounding trite or overly simplisitic, it is a fair assessment to say that al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia is “on the run“. This does not mean they cannot retrench. Additional forces are required to truly condemn them to a fate of eradication or effective neutralization. But these forces have been demanded and are being made available - both from the United States and from the Iraqi Army.

Military successes are certain. There remain three significant elements that will continue to plague Iraq, and all three are largely political. One is that Iran and Saudi Arabia continue to flood their “supporters” - read, armed extremists - in the country with arms and manpower. Without this problem staunched, the enemy’s numbers and strength will readily regenerate. The second is that bombings like the one today will continue to inflict mass civilian casualties, ruining any veneer of real security enjoyed by the Iraqis in mixed-ethnic neighborhoods, most notable Baghdad and its environs. This problem, funded by the prior element and facilitated by corruption within the security structure in that area, will be effectively impossible to truly end without cutting off its source. Lastly, Iraqi military forces lack two key components - experienced leaders, depleted by de-Baathification and attrition, and gear, withheld by the federal government’s executive, Maliki.

There is a trend in all of these injurious elements. Namely, that politics is to blame. Convenient as it is to say that the Democrats in Washington are “cutting the forces off at their knees” like Sean Hannity did today, they have not actually blocked any spending on the war. The goods have been slow in getting there, and to the Maliki government’s credit, the Iraqi budget does include defense spending. Nevertheless, Baghdad has been less of a conduit than a clogged funnel.

The sectarian violence of the streets pales in its damning effects to the sectarian will perpetuated in the Iraqi parliament. Those unfortunate enough to be unpopular with the government - notably the Sunni - are starved and deprived, according to the Inspector General of Reconstruction in Iraq.

How long will the American and Iraqi people be forced to endure this de facto tyranny? We must take a fierce look at the Iraqi government’s leadership and bear in mind that the traditional objective in warfare is to deny the enemy its means to fight. In Iraq, that means is born of poverty, fueled by desperate lack, and conducted by local extremists who see a sectarian showdown as the only real means of securing a fair existence. We need to recognize that the source of this problem is the deliberate stalling in government by a sectarian leader with near total power. And we need to demand of ourselves an answer to those who would fill the extremists’ ranks inspired by the question, “what else do we have to hope for but to secure a victory by force?”

Another question that will be far more audible and explicit in the days to come will be, “how long will this go on?” We are only now beginning the month-long recess of the Iraqi parliament. Even after their return, the frustration with no reconciliation legislation or measures being effective pursued by Maliki’s leadership shows no signs of abating. In fact, it is inspiring even legislators of the more extreme opposition to simply give up on the process. Petraeus’ report will not be redemptive or damning to the effort. It will show improvement in the war, but repeat the clear message about the situation given by the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, in his confirmation hearings this week: That the critical element is reconciliation and the diplomatic engagement of the countries surrounding Iraq.

So, “how long?” considering all these indicators show no sign of conclusion? Likely for a much longer time yet. And this is both good and worrisome.

It is good because the leading opposition to the war in the US Congress - the Democrats, have shown by deed and by leaked strategizing - that short of total submission to their proposed policy of a legislated withdrawal, they will not forcibly affect a change in strategy. Petraeus’ report cannot deliver a sense of total victory nor a promise of total defeat, and so anti-war Republicans will not be any more induced to simply toe the Democratic line. In short, Congress will do nothing different.

Sadly, it is not Congress who needs to do something different. It is good that they continue funding the war effort, for the military is doing good work. But neither solves the situation. Only the Executive branch’s direction can do that. We critics can grumble about Congressional callousness to the Iraqi plight or poll-driven ambivalence over war support, but we would be complaining about eventualities - Congress does not conduct the war, nor the diplomacy with Baghdad, Tehran and Riyadh. They may keep the ship sailing, and mutter mutinous things, but it is the captain who steers the ship.

And what is the captain doing? President Bush spoke with Maliki, who fed him platitudes about realizing how important reconciliation is. The State Department spoke with Iran, who also agreed on the importance of stability in Iraq. And nothing, forseeably, will happen. Many scoff at diplomacy with Iran out of a notion that Iran’s agenda would keep them an enemy of ours no matter what. Can a similar measure not be applied to Maliki and his Shiite DAWA party?

The course is clear. The military is doing great, but it is merely strengthening the skin of a cancerous body. If the United States does not prescribe some political surgery, and soon, Iraq will just continue to die and scores of men and women, American and Iraqi, will daily die along with it.

The surgery in question should be an irresistable political demand that high-level officials of the United States Executive meet with the key legislators in the Iraqi Parliament and not recess until all critical reconciliation laws are passed and the means to enact them established. Like the Constitutional Convention of the US’ history, the legislators and officials should be forced to remain in each other’s company until all objectives are reached. This need not be done with an “or else” - threats of withdrawing troops or aid need not enter into the situation. When the inner court of the leader of the free world comes to town with uncompromising dialogue, the Parliament will listen. Attendance will be mandatory for the same reasons voting was. And if both sides boycott the talks, the US should reserve the right to dissolve the government it created as fatally flawed.

There is but one authority on earth that can deliver that prescription.

Let us pray for the sake of the sick, desperate and dying that he decides to do so.

Love may make the world go round. Irony certainly sets its course. In the instance of a particular piece of reactionary commentary I discovered of late, it illustrates the wayward myopia that has lately navigated America’s factious path.

A recent article by a well-published author and professor of Classics at CSU Fresno, Victor Davis Hanson, is making the email rounds and came to my attention. Hanson’s article contends that higher education’s shift from what he classifies as “traditional education” to “therapeutic education” has denied the future elites - so to speak - of America the proper framework of knowledge to make moral comparisons. In essence, it is an argument that specialization of study focusing on societies’ fringes leads to moral relativism, while traditional studies give one a comprehensive view of the world: a lens through which the entirety of globe and time on earth, not just the particularities of a certain population segment or time period, can be analyzed.

This is not the case. If anything, comprehensive education informs us that there has always been complexity and conflict in the world, always hypocrisy and always questioning.

The Results of Traditional Education Examined:

There is something to be said for generality in study. I entered university with the intent of achieving that “catholic education”, and so absorbed a large scope of generalities - Introduction to Political Science, Mass Media and Politics, Theories of War - as well as specialties - 18th Century British Literature, Female Sexuality, Terrorism and Genocide. Yet Hanson’s article uses his argument about the effects of the shift in higher education to dismiss criticisms of conservative attitudes as lacking the proper historical perspective. Particularly, he cites the assertions made by some critics - that Iraq is the “greatest mistake in our nation’s history” and because the US and Israel have a bomb, it is alright for theocratic Iran to have one too - as being a result of this ignorance:

Is the Iraq war, as we are often told, the “greatest mistake” in our nation’s history?

Because Israel and the United States have a bomb, is it then O.K. for theocratic Iran to have one too?

Americans increasingly cannot seem to answer questions like these adequately because they are blissfully uneducated. They have not acquired a broad knowledge of language, literature, philosophy, and history.

Both his basic argument and the extension of it are inherently flawed, and the contemptuous, narrow perspective they espouse are antithetical to the evolving demands of a global community.

The notion that traditional education programs in higher education leads to contemporary conservative values assumes a number of specious factors. One is that contemporary conservative values are synonymous with traditional values. These lodestones of principle would derive from what Hanson categorizes, “absolute truths”:

If there are no intrinsic differences—only relative degrees of “power” that construct our “reality”—between a Western democracy that is subject to continual audit by a watchdog press, an active political opposition, and a freely voting citizenry, and an Iranian theocracy that bans free speech to rule by religious edict, then it will matter little which entity has nuclear weapons.

In the end, education is the ability to make sense of the chaotic present through the prism of the absolute and eternal truths of the ages. But if there are no prisms—no absolutes, no eternals, no truths, no ages past—then the present will appear only as nonsense.

Considering the reaction to wars such as the Mexican-American War (America’s first war of choice, and in which some American soldiers were summarily executed for refusing to fight a “war of choice”), the Civil War (resisted by the Draft Riots and other significant protests) and to FDR’s argument that we should intervene in the adolescent World War II (staunchly resisted by Republicans in particular and much of the public of the 1940 election season in general), I would advance that there has always been political strife in the country, especially in times of debate over the course of a war. Struggles over civil liberties, abuse of power by government and American use of warfare against non-government threats have always been present in our history, even with the vigor and topicality of today - such as the fight over executive privilege involving spying by the Jefferson White House, the concern over the Alien and Sedition Act, and the war with the Barbary Pirates, the famed “shores of Tripoli” from the Marine Corps anthem.

So having a general knowledge of traditional history does not, actually, provide easy answers to the conflicting contentions of our modern times, nor does it negate liberal arguments. Even Hanson’s specific examples, that of whether Iraq is the greatest mistake in our nation’s history and whether Iran having the bomb is simply not okay even though the US and Israel have them, retain their complexity and are not resolved by an instant moral acuity when viewed through history’s long lens.

In the latter case, Hanson should know this all too well. He has written on the war that brought the doom of the golden age and imperial era of what is touted as the “world’s first western democracy” - Athens, Greece in the 5th century BC. The Peloponnesian War was a grueling, exhausting conflict between Athens and its dwindling allies and Sparta and its growing Delian league allies. It saw use of terror on both sides, asymmetrical warfare; many of the principles, if not the specific practices, in use in modern warfare.

It is the basic game theory that the inspiration for the Peloponnesian War can be distilled to that is particularly pertinent.

In this specific instance, Athens was massively powerful following the wars with Persia and wanted to rebuild its walls; Sparta, seeing those defenses as the crowning device to make Athenian defensive power as extreme as its offensive power, objected. The principle of that objection - seen in today’s debates over Nuclear Arms and Anti-Ballistic Missile Defense Systems - is that if you can’t attack your enemy, but he can attack you, he has more incentive to attack you. In short, unless one’s abilities to harm the other and succeed are as co-equal as possible, there is more incentive for conflict than cooperation. This is the “Prisoner’s Dilemma“, and it is the basis of the “MAD” (Mutually Assured Destruction) security arrangement that kept the Soviets and the US from annihilation during the latter half of the Cold War - the mean comfort taken by both nations that if either of them used nuclear arms, both sides would entirely be destroyed, and thus is made no sense to use nuclear arms.

Again - this is the basis of a conflict that spawned a war that Hanson has written an excellent book on: if Athens has a wall, it cannot be attacked, but if Sparta does not have a wall, it can be attacked, and thus Sparta is incentivized to attack Athens before it has a wall. While this specific arms issue did not lead to war, the germ of inequality is what ultimately sickened the peace between Sparta and Athens - helped along by Athenian arrogance, Spartan insecurity and the usual turmoil that comes from history’s progress.

And yet Hanson apparently does not see the applicability of this game theory to whether it is allowable for Iran - and other rogue, developing nations - to have the bomb just as the United States does. While MAD has prevented conflict between we and Russia, the other nuclear superpower, but the building of the Athenian walls led to a fatal inequality that devastated the world’s first democracy, which seems the more “allowable” scenario?

The Value of Specialized Education and the Nature of Critical Thinking:

History is pertinent to the present not only when it is directly compared to today, but when the game theory, philosophical principles and relational dynamics are compared. In essence, though it is helpful to know the minutiae of the kit an Athenian soldier carried or the specific concerns of the Burr Treason Jefferson was spying on, it is when those incidents are distilled to their basic dynamic framework that they can be mined for conclusions to influence the ongoing experiment of history. In fact, it is therein that Hanson’s argument about the relative worthlessness of “therapeutic education” begins to entirely dissolve. He disparages the “deductive reasoning” these courses allegedly inculcate in the student, contrary to the “inductive reasoning” allegedly cultivated by general education:

…The student is expected to arrive at the instructor’s own preconceived conclusions. The courses are also captives of the present—hostages of the contemporary media and popular culture from which they draw their information and earn their relevance.

The theme of all such therapeutic curricula is relativism. There are no eternal truths, only passing assertions that gain credence through power and authority. Once students understand how gender, race, and class distinctions are used to oppress others, they are then free to ignore absolute “truth,” since it is only a reflection of one’s own privilege.

By contrast, the aim of traditional education was to prepare a student in two very different ways. First, classes offered information drawn from the ages—the significance of Gettysburg, the characters in a Shakespeare play, or the nature of the subjunctive mood. Integral to this acquisition were key dates, facts, names, and terms by which students, in a focused manner in conversation and speech, could refer to the broad knowledge that they had gathered.

Second, traditional education taught a method of inductive inquiry. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, logic, and rhetoric were tools to be used by a student, drawing on an accumulated storehouse of information, to present well-reasoned opinions—the ideology of which was largely irrelevant to professors and the university.

Chicano Studies and Women’s Studies are specialized areas of study, but it is the essentials of the events they study more than the details that have their applicability to positively influencing the course of events today. They study the plight of the oppressed, models of organization, and how change can be brought about. Film Studies is indeed about some technical aspects of film - arguably it is a course of study that has more science to it than most “liberal arts”. But to be a screenwriter, director, even a producer, one must understand the basics of story-telling, narrative structure, the traditional dynamics of drama. And, considering it is not going far to say that life imitates art in many ways, understanding how we interact in narrative forms and why is a close cousin to understanding how we interact in a cultural or political medium.

This argument in favor of the specialized areas of study is precisely the one that has been customarily advanced to protect the ailing area of study of Classics - the very area of study Hanson teaches. People throughout the 20th century have argued to the inapplicability of Classics - “latin is a dead language”, “the political struggles of that time have no parallel in today’s liberal democracy”, “why study dead Greeks?” And Classics professors - defending the ageless wisdom of Thucydides or the genius insight into human interactions of Homer or Virgil - have argued, accurately in my opinion, “the events may be dated, but their lessons never will be.” In short, they argue that though theirs is a speciality that has millennia between its actuality and today - far longer than Chicano Studies or Film Studies, I feel I should add - the spirit, sinew and lessons of that speciality are living, wondering and dying in today’s world.

Want to study oppression and revolt? One could look to Cesar Chavez or the Spartacus revolt. Want to study the human side of a political battle over an unpopular, dragging war? Read “The Iliad” or study the German film “Untergang”. The value of education is in the mind that seeks the applicability of the material, assesses it honestly, and applies it unflinchingly.

Critical Thought from Specialization vs. Selective Thought to Satisfy an Agenda:

That students acquire a broad scope of knowledge is good, but it is the courage to delve deep enough - to grasp the heart of the lesson, especially if it is unpleasant - that has most value.

It does not seem Hanson applies the same principle. I say this on basis of the limited example of his comparison of the “mistake” of the Iraq war to the significant military reversals of 1776 - Washington’s Army in retreat; 1864 - the flight to Gettysburg; and January 1942 - presumably our retreat from the Pacific Islands in the face of Japanese onslaught. Were those not similar “mistakes,” that could inspire similar handwringing? Were they not greater than Iraq, considering the materiel lost, the lives devastated?

And, no, in fact, they were not. Only if one employs the kind of post-modern myopia that has leftist radical Chicano Studies majors suggesting Chavez’s unionization for farm workers is moral, ethical and functional basis of an argument for total amnesty and open borders. Or that feminism’s analysis of the power dynamic between men and women in the west leads to the necessity of a “gender homeland for women” - Andrea Dworkin’s separatist agenda. But despite how Dworkin or Hanson would like it to be, incidents have to be viewed in their greater historical context.

Unionization is fine, but total amnesty and open borders would be a disastrous financial drain on the US, just as it was for Rome. Men do abuse women more often than women do men - unless you buy some studies with some exceedingly dubious research methodologies - and yet separatism is ridiculous on a number of biological levels. And while Washington was surely worried of the fate of the Revolution, Lincoln of the Union, and Roosevelt of our staging grounds in the Pacific, these were not “mistakes”.

It was not a mistake for us to leave Britain’s rule; it had been brewing for some time, was practically inevitable, and, arguably, turned out pretty good. It was likewise not a mistake to fight the Confederacy, or even switch from McClellan’s strategy to Grant’s, because not only did they attack us, but a divided America would have been nearly unsustainable. And as for whether 1942 was a “mistake”: We had enjoyed an enormous military build-up that left us at parity with, if not superior to, Japan; Japan attacked us and Germany declared war on us, thus pitting what was arguably the greatest military bloc in the world against us; if fascism had conquered Communism, it still would have been us or them, so there was no keeping out of it; and, most importantly, we turned around and beat the bejeesus out of every single nation - replacing Britain, chaining the Soviets behind the borders established immediately post-war, and actually occupying Germany and Japan.

These are not mistakes. These are examples of dire times, yes, but nobody thinks we “blew it” by throwing off the British yoke after we’d been considering it for a good half-century. We were not “woefully unprepared” in 1942. We did not lack a “clear political objective” in the civil war.

But invading Iraq with the intent of regime change was a mistake. We did blow a lot of strategic credibility and moral prestige by shoving the war down the UN’s throat, going anyway without their support, and then failing to resolve things at all. We were woefully unprepared, sending in an army of around 150,000 to conquer Iraq when 650,000 were what we used to merely kick Iraq out of Kuwait, having inadequate post-war provisions for the Iraqi people’s basic securities and human needs, and charting a haphazard political course for their fledgling government, if even that. And we do lack a clear political objective - we are critically lacking. This war is economically disastrous, strategically humbling and morally confused. And many great thinkers knew it would be that way - conservatives included - and the Administration either fired, ignored or talked over them and went anyway. That is a mistake.

“Greatest mistake?” One of the traditional notions of assessing history is that it has “cycles”. Empires rise, decline, must assert power to rise again. Either they redefine the definition of power - like shifting from military to economic and dominating the new way - or they assert themselves militarily. In this era when dearth of human-sustaining resources and conflicts over industry-sustaining resources are the predominant factor in much of the world’s conflicts, American could have used the former course. We could have - and still can - sustain our “Imperial Power” through technology that makes us dominant while mitigating the causes of global poverty, regional dispute and biological disaster. But the Administration did not. Instead, it chose the military course - in keeping with the imperatives set by the perspective of the influential essay, “The Clash of Civilizations“. Fight global Islam, dominate it militarily, replace it with western liberal democracy. It did not work out. At the beginning of the first and biggest ambitious project for an America struggling to define its Imperial nature post-Cold War, we picked on a puny set of nations - Iraq and Afghanistan - and could not win. We have not lost yet, but we have not won either. And for a world that saw us crush the ghost of the Soviet Union in the deserts of Iraq in ‘91, calm the definitive realm of ethnic strife in ‘95 and ‘99, and raise to new heights of human rights commitment and economic power during the 90s, this was a humiliation and an argument against our strength unseen in American history.

In short, we went out to prove we were still the Fascism-thrashing, Communism-throttling, Balkans-conquering Empire, and have ended up wounded, bogged down, and poor. No wonder our enemies crow. No one beats us as thoroughly as we do ourselves through limitation of mind and limitation of spirit.

Prime Minister Maliki has announced that US troops can leave “any time they want”, and in essence added that we could also not let the door hit us on the ass on the way out.

Is this a show of confidence? Unlikely. More likely, considering the wealth of criticism of US actions he heaped on us, he expects that the US’ plan is dashing his dreams of arming Shiite militias through the Iraqi Army we finance, and crushing the Sunni militias as soon as the US, exhausted of war, departs. For now we have a more effective and balanced military strategy. Now we have - at least rhetorical - emphasis on the primacy of a political solution. Now we have accountability leveled against his government.

And so now Maliki fears that we are on to his vision of a state-sponsored Shiite insurgency. If not “on to him”, at least that we are canny enough to know that arming Sunni extremists puts a check on Shiite extremists. He doubtless fears the outcome that we have suggested the Surge strategy could enable - armed Sunnis, armed Shi’a, and an Iraqi Parliament forced by the presence of a high-level US delegation to enact effective reconciliation, or at least to be held more accountable. He must be reading my blog.

Or he sees the writing on the wall. Either way, he knows that we’re now taking a subversive approach towards Sunni opposition, and that deflates the Shi’a predominance of the Iraqi state’s struggle against the militias. He also must suspect that while we work to focus on al-Qaeda with all Nationalist forces we can muster to our cause, we will also not tolerate the blatant intervention of another foreign agency - Iran. That Maliki’s announcement came merely a day after we hit a Shiite police station suspected of being a nexus of collaboration with Iran’s “Delta Force”, the “Quds Force”, and attacked the financial assets of that force, is no coincidence.

Now Maliki has given the White House a poison pill to swallow in reply. The Administration’s options to respond are severely limited. His critics, even moderate Republicans among them, will surely say, “You are being told by the American people to leave. Now the Iraq people have said you can leave. Do you think you know better than the American people and the Iraqi people?”

And, of course, we do know better - we know that Maliki is not an ally, has never been an ally, but is an adversary. He is an extension of the will to Shiite dominance that has in its factious ranks such other charming characters as Mukhtada al-Sadr. By further extension, he is connected by a singularity of vision to Iran.

I have sometimes felt Iraq could be well-served by simply acknowledging that it is a Shi’a dominated state. The Shi’a are the leading force in the political structure we endorsed - a democratic structure. If we, too, have been forthright in our stated aims for the Iraqi government’s formation, we would abide by their wishes and leave.

But if we are to be honest with ourselves, we need to recognize that in Prime Minister Maliki we do not face a mere difference of opinion over the course of the Surge, but a hostile regime of our own creation.

The mixed report on the progress of the Iraq situation coming out of the White House this week has been reviewed by both supporters and critics of the President’s policy with too general a perspective. Detractors have been quick to seize on the eight of eighteen grades that the Iraqi government has been found making unsatisfactory progress in. The White House and its advocates have fixed on the eight satisfactory grades. But an objective observation finds a definite divide in the report that again underscores the point this blog and other defense analysts have noted - that in Iraq, there is a distinct party that is now making the grade and a distinct party that is failing.

The US military and the sectarian groups it has coaxed to join in its security efforts are passing the grade. The Surge, while not entirely successful, has begun to isolate the greatest threat to current objectives for stability - al-Qaeda’s coalition. It has done this tactically, by securing neighborhoods with an enduring presence and by changing the mission objective from clearing the enemy to fixing, surrounding and eliminating it. And it has done this strategically, by enabling the ire of Nationalist militias against the al-Qaeda interlopers who endanger their own ploys for control. In the once-lethal Anbar province, in the south and in the areas around Mosul, regions that were once meat-grinders for Americans now have local militias striving to drive out al-Qaeda. This is progress. It is not final, nor will it endure without real reconciliation, but it is real. It should be appreciated.

Conversely, the Iraqi government has failed. While the bodies of American soldiers and their Iraqi comrades provide the scar tissue, the infectious political factionalism is still being allowed to fester. Giving militias more ability to control their neighborhoods makes them better enemies to al-Qaeda, not better allies of a unity government. The measures of true reconciliation and power sharing - provincial rule; even-handed enforcement of the law; oil revenue sharing; the reverse of de-Baathification - all are stalled and no one with power in Baghdad has their shoulder to the wheel to force them to move. There is no incentive for them. The common people throughout Iraq want better lives; the politicians in Baghdad want to fire up their base for what most see as an inevitable all-out civil war.

One grade on the checklist, militia disarmament, seems ludicrous in its inclusion. Is the Iraq government really expected to disarm militias? How can this be when the US is actively arming the overtly sectarian Sunni militias while by extension arming the Shiites who dominate the legitimate security force structure? The notion is absurd - it asks the Iraqis to take away the very guns we are giving the militias. Then again, absurdity never got in the way of a war: just today a significant assault intended to disarm Shiite militias with likely connections with Iran enflamed public hatred and disgust of America’s forces.

But many of the “benchmarks” are not absurd. They are clear and concrete measures necessary to achieving unity. The problem with them is, as we’ve observed consistently, that no one is advocating or acting on them with the same sense of duty and sacrifice as they are the military aspects of the Iraq strategy. The White House has sent a sustained, innovative and forceful troop presence into the conflict, but not a diplomatic presence. It has allowed commanders to sit down with former enemies in the Sunni Nationalist brigades until some kind of alliance is reached, but has not demanded that the Iraqi government similarly sit down with high-level American politicians until an alliance is reached. It feels at liberty to lock entire townships like Baqouba and Sadr City in a vice grip of troops, but has not locked in the only people who can truly enact an end to sectarian strife with legislation - the Iraqi parliament.

It must. There will be no enduring peace without its framework being laid now, and laid strong. In order to achieve this, the White House has to abandon its position of isolating itself from responsibility for Iraq’s political attitude and has to adopt a stance like Eisenhower when he said of the Korean conflict in ‘52, “I will go to Korea”.

Go to Iraq, President Bush. If you will not send yourself, send someone with true muscle and significance, such as Vice-President Cheney or Secretary Rice. Send them to some air-conditioned complex in the heart of the Green Zone now declared “satisfactory” in its safety, lock the doors, and do not come out until legislation is drafted and enacted - until Iraq has as substantial a foundation for peace as it does for security.

Once was the time that the US and a starving, belligerent North Korea were working directly to satisfy the ailing nation’s energy needs without giving North Korea the opportunity or incentive to develop nuclear weapons.

Now, seven years and seven North Korean nuclear warheads later, we are almost back to that point. North Korea remains a fugitive from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has made no binding agreements as to working towards a non-nuclear Korean peninsula, and has only just today set a date to allow the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) back into the country. There’s no telling what they’ll find or, rather, what their unsmiling handlers will allow them to find.

What happened in the intervening years? What dismantled the hard-won “Agreed Framework” of the Clinton era that had kept North Korea without a weapon or effective delivery system?

Not to point fingers or anything…

The Agreed Framework got tossed out the window little after Clinton’s successor took office. Things went rapidly downhill from there, with the US Administration speaking with censure against the DPRK and then sitting around, doing nothing to back it up. What commenced was a tete-a-tete with the North Koreans creeping closer to their weapons program ways and the White House waving its finger while still refusing to talk.

Vice-President Cheney allegedly summed up the policy well by saying “We don’t negotiate with evil. We defeat evil.”

North Korea is really evil. Its enormous army - nearly the size of our entire armed forces combined - is designed for the sole purpose of conquering the Korean peninsula. It has huge counterfeiting organizations, kidnaps people for the sexual delight of its autocratic leader and maintains a seedy presence in classic espionage settings such as Macao. And yes, it aids and abets terrorists. If there actually had been an Axis of Evil - and give it time; could happen - it surely would have been the “Dr. No” of the organization. However, shutting it out and refusing direct talks with it - the only kind of talks that have ever worked to achieve something of dire significance with North Korea - only isolated its mighty resources for nasty deeds. It kicked out inspectors, enriched uranium, developed a delivery system that could strike the US, and sold all manner of this weaponry to such “rational actors” as Libya. And the fact is that with weapons inspectors there, with the incentive of being able to prop up its hellish robot state with foreign-financed energy, these things might have been prevented. Limited oversight was still better than no oversight. Limited incentive to comply with international will was still more than no incentive.

And as for “defeating evil”? And “not negotiating with it”? Well, after North Korea’s downplayed nuclear test, talks resumed mighty fast, and now the beginnings of another assistance “framework” have been formed.

The point of this is not that inspections in the 90s were foolproof - or autocrat-proof. Surely the IAEA was deceived. It was not until the dismissal of inspectors that the DPRK undertook its boldest acts, at a pace now unrestricted, but the IAEA presence alone may not have been enough to keep the Korean Peninsula nuclear-free. The point is that the US forgot a basic principle of foreign relations - as with Iraq, with Afghanistan and with the ABM Treaty:

Do not break something before you know how to rebuild it.

Now, seven years and seven warheads on, we are returning to the North Koreans with an even more limited, more sweetened offering in order to get them to restore what, a long time back, was not really working in the first place.

In anticipation of the July 15th briefing I here encapsulate the developing events in Iraq. Partly this is to compile a list of significant events in order to figure whether progress is being made in the slightest. But before we begin to measure, it’s worthwhile to figure out how to measure.

[Ed. Note: Thanks to REM for correction on the Churchill quote.]

Despite their convenience, body counts have never been a good indicator of how a war’s going - ours or theirs. Measuring the enemy’s body count certainly doesn’t work, as Vietnam well proved. A staggering amount of Vietnamese were killed in the latter phases of the war, even after Nixon’s victory resulted in a shift from troop level increases to withdrawal, and still it did nothing to shatter the enemy’s resolve. Similarly, going on the basis of our own casualties is again a bad indicator.

There are two reasons for this, and while neither has much to do with the basis of anti-war advocates’ arguments, both strike against the foremost reason they have been gaining in strength of late - namely, the mounting number of American dead “despite” the Surge. What people must realize is that the mounting dead are not an unexpected byproduct of the Surge, but in many ways the result of it.

The first reason for this is that more troops means more contact with the enemy, and more contact means more death. Sometimes this is more death all around, but in a counter-insurgency like Iraq, it could mean just against the occupier. The purpose of this is not purely suicidal, however - the intent is always to use those troops to hold more ground, either to secure against the enemy or to encircle and destroy them.

The second reason is that it is usually when a side is pressured by its adversary that it throws more forces into the fray with more determined and cunning tactics. This has been the case in almost every major war of late - World War I had the German Spring Offensive in response to the United States entering the war, World War II had the notorious Battle of the Bulge as well as similar offensives in the south and in the east, Korea had Pork Chop Hill, Vietnam had the Tet Offensive and the Gulf War had the Battle of 73 Easting. In each instance, the enemy makes a resolute effort to inflict harm so that they’re not overwhelmed fatally. I cannot emphasize enough how high the carnage climbs in the last phases of successful wars - especially our last successful example of nation building from that list, World War II.

One could easily look at that list and say, “Yes, but we lost in Vietnam and didn’t achieve much in Korea”. The critical difference in success is not the body counts, nor when in the process of the war they occurred, but in the political strategy and aims, and in the resolve to see the war through.

World War II was massively expensive in its final phases, in both men and treasure. Body counts soared on all sides, and the US teetered near bankruptcy considering its war debt. So in the end it was moral resolve that saw that conflict through to a successful end as much - if not more so - than any other factor. Considering the resolve shown by the enemy, who truly fought to the last as we occupied their homeland with devastating force, it could have been a very near thing.

We lost in Vietnam because we chose to pull out. Tet was a horrible, even crippling blow to many of the North Vietnamese forces, particularly their irregulars, the Viet Cong. But rather than exploit this, we kept pressure on them at consistent levels and then, a year later, switched to a strategy of withdrawal.

That having been said, pulling out is not always a bad thing. In Vietnam it was arguably the right thing, because what it would have taken to win at that late phase would have been a strategy too aggressive for the American psyche and American coffers to endure - essentially an invasion and occupation of the North. Korea was a similar situation, wherein we had neither the resources nor the raw manpower to invade our real adversary above the contested 38th Parallel - the People’s Republic of China. So even though political strategy and the will to see it out is the critical factor in turning the late phase bloodbath into grounds for a victory parade or for decades of hand-wringing, people need to be honest about what the cost of victory will be. There is no doubt that America, with its awesome resources, can pay it. The question is whether it wants to.

Right now, the manpower and capital of the Surge is being poured into a single strategic purpose. It is not the annihilation of the al-Qaeda elements in Iraq, even though that’s part of it. It is not securing all of Baghdad or the contested areas either, though providing a more permanent security presence in critical areas can, is, and should be going on. It is giving the Iraqi Parliament and the areas of the country that they need to apply their political will to in order to create an infrastructure some protection.

In order to judge our success in Iraq, we must not look at the body counts. The “suicidal surge” is an accurate characterization. That is the nature of war. It is always suicide. We may wrap it in flags and anthems and endless reels of action films but in the end result, no matter what is written on the note there is still a body on the floor. In Iraq’s case, 3,600 American bodies. But in order to judge the success of that sacrifice, we need to judge not the sacrifice itself but the end it was made for.

We need to judge the political progress being made.

And, sadly, though our troops have been committed to the fight in record numbers and our ethics, possibly our ultimate security, have been compromised as we arm both Shiite and Sunni militants - as we give every indication tactically that we will defeat the hard line insurgents at any cost - there has been no such political commitment. The surge has us putting our troops in terrific risk, both in conventional battles and by essentially massing up so that insurgents can bomb us more effectively, and yet both our political leadership and the Iraqis have shown no such embrace of risk, no such devotion to victory. This is the truly sickening and sad thing about Iraq. We’re demanding that our sons and daughters step in front of bullets and bombs so that partisan strife can continue. Eight Americans died while Bush was hosting Putin for two days of fun in the sun in Kennebunkport.

That is not oversimplifying or over dramatizing. There is no doubt the ABM quarrel with Russia is a matter of grand significance, but can any American think there is a more pressing issue than Iraq? And since we can, objectively, set aside the bearing the casualties of the Surge have as a measure of the war’s outcome, can we all subjectively agree that it seems the political solution those casualties are being sacrificed for is under served by both sides?

Bush has done extremely little as regards dealing with the Iraq parliament this year. Granted, it is the Iraqis in parliament themselves who need to reconcile and share power, and it is they who’re dragging their feet, but then we must consider why we’re loath to force them to move. Why are we content to perpetuate this seemingly ceaseless cycle of butchery in order to prop up a government that is not just practically but willfully dysfunctional?

Just like in the last phases of World War II and of Vietnam - of our proudest war and our most shameful - we are scraping the bottom of the war chest. The expense to our treasury is enormous, and the term “war economy”, spoken with an ominous and despair tone, is becoming increasingly familiar. The expense in terms of damage to the minds and bodies of our service people is also crippling on a mass scale, as the Walter Reed, VA compensation and recruiting failures have shown. Things are breaking down. The same holds true for the strongholds of al-Qaeda of Mesopotamia. But to what end are we stacking up the bodies in record amounts? Bush seems to be evading the Iraq issue rather than tackling it with all he has. Certainly the Congress has been fixated on it of late. But both sides talk merely of the military aspect. It is the political failures of the Iraqi parliament that must be at the center of each argument.

And, just as only direct, sustained force can win tactically, only direct, sustained political intervention is going to get things moving in the halls of power in Baghdad. Until then, we can pile our corpses as high as we’d like to buttress those walls. Without providing a strong center with political will, it lets the universal chaos of war drift across the fine line between success and simple suicide.

When slicing the spin from the meat of the matter, it’s important to bear in mind that sometimes outrage against a group is called for. When seeking the truth, one has to guard against the convenient but false notion that it always lies in the center. And always when we criticize the extreme rhetoric of both sides and their mercenary exploitation of its ferment, we best remember that the cause we champion is not to sustain moderation but to destroy ignorance.

It’s in light of all this that we recognize another elephant in the rooms of the White House and call foul against the extraordinary secrecy of this administration.

Already I can hear the hackles rising. For a long time, defenders of the White House - itself included - have attributed attacks against its procedures as partisan rancor, at best. Some of that’s valid. Most critical of these inaccurate accusations would be the blanket term that the White House “lied” to get us into war - a misperception that actually covers up some very important flaws in how the Executive’s intelligence and policy-making appartus functions. But in the case of the Bush administration being phenomenally and harmfully secret, their accusers, not their defenders, are the champions of truth and tolerance.

The most recent scandal is that the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney have been called on to cough up some documents pertaining to the domestic surveillance program, steadily refused, and then had to be subpoenaed. This time, the White House could not mask their ill behavior under a label of “partisanship”. The Judiciary Committee’s vote was 13-3, hardly down party lines, and included the three senior Republicans. This isn’t a case of Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism” or an opportunistic Democratic Congress looking to throw scraps of their fallen enemy to the jackals. This is a real matter of keeping our democracy healthy.

President Thomas Jefferson allegedly called information “the currency of democracy”. He declared the free exchange of it to be essential to ensuring a healthy democratic body. And in the past, the freedom of information has been a heavy burden for an Executive tasked with balancing not only stewardship of that healthy democratic body but its national security interests as well.

How to keep the whole of the public as informed as possible while still keeping their enemies ignorant of the methods you use to protect them?

Presidents have sometimes claimed “Executive Privilege” in order to circumvent this. That’s the notion - and not a law, not a right, but a notion - that the Executive can and should do some things secretly from other branches in the interests of national security.

Sometimes, the investigation itself is so absurd as to enter the realm of the farcical and truly cruel. Clinton was absurd when he invoked “Executive Privilege” to keep his aides from having to testify about Lewinsky. Then again, it was absurd that they would be testifying for Lewinsky in the first place. Perhaps we should, in the era where spin and slander hold sovereign power over the wisdom and works of a politician, introduce the notion of “calling bullshit on it”.

In the case of today’s subpoena and the scandal surrounding, the White House cannot continue to act on such a notion. Gonzales called the dispute “competing institutional interests”. If he’s talking about a competition between the Constitutionally-ordained institution of the Legislature acting as the people’s representatives in overseeing the President’s activities and the new institution this White House has of covering up its shady dealings, he is right. If he is trying to minimize the importance of this issue, he is sorely wrong.

The matters the people’s representatives find the Bush administration closeted about are far more serious than oral sex and stained dresses. First it was an attempt to determine what Vice President Cheney’s energy task force - which included an understandable but possibly somewhat biased volume of oil and energy industry lobbyists - talked about. The GAO was after the documents surrounding that meeting, Cheney refused, threats of legal action were exchanged and, for the first time in his Presidency, Bush called on executive privilege “in substance”.

Then it was the 9/11 Commission. Again legal action had to be threatened to get the Executive to talk to the committee. And even then, the restrictions on what could be said and the accountability for saying it was strained nearly beyond belief.

Now at last we have the domestic surveillance program. A summary of this controversy - the President claims the ability to listen in on the communications of American citizens not only without a warrant, but without any oversight of the special court, FISA, that was set up to allow him to do so in the case of emergencies. Again, this is not a partisan issue - senior members of Bush’s administration who would proudly count themselves among the far right wing, such as then-Attorney General Ashcroft, vehemently objected to this program’s attitude and implementation.

Ashcroft’s replacement, Alberto Gonzales, was a champion of the program - as he had been on such issues as how torture laws don’t really apply either - and now has done little to nothing to provide forthright testimony to the Judiciary Committee. The Committee now has subpoena and, in this last hour, Bush has flatly refused.

So is this a molehill being made into a mountain? Let’s mine its core components.

The issues at stake: Energy industry talking about setting the energy policy of the country. Reforming the security response of the Executive. Constitutional rights are possibly violated by turning what Nixon did in a spasm of paranoia into a policy.

The question: Does the Judiciary Committee, at least privately, have the power not just in fact - they do - but in ideal democratic function to oversee such matters?

The White House’s consistent answer: No.

Molehill?: No.

This is a big issue. Our government was set up so that at least some elected representatives of the people could oversee these critical matters and now, in defiance of our Constitution, the Executive refuses, time and again, to all them to. It’s impeding government’s ability to function properly when that kind of attitude prevails. That’s the real threat to National Security.

It occludes our ability to see and therefore understand the methods and motives of those in power. Without understanding, we cannot act properly and without acting we make ourselves no better than the subjects of a monarch. No offense, United Kingdom - the whole “subject” thing is kind of debatable in your case anyway, right?

In order to maintain this clear perspective, we have to realize that not all scandals are spin. Some are as outrageous - or more so - than they seem.

…………

Fun postscript. Jefferson was the first President who invoked Executive Privilege in order to hide information on the basis of National Security, and had to be subpoenaed.

Not all scandals are spin, but it seems spin gets us all in the end.

Across the world, crucial political scenes are being smeared by sensationalist pot-stirrings and opportunistic spin. Fun as this sounds, these factious foamings do no one any good except for the media and small, petty parties doing the stirring. They endanger the fate of the entire world just so that someone can sell advertising space or keep their campaign chest stuffed.

In Gaza and the West Bank, the proverbial slings and arrows were recently real bullets. But as damaging as the takeover of Gaza by the militant HAMAS party’s militias was in real terms, it’s the subsequent dialogue that does the worst long-term harm. President Mahmoud Abbas of HAMAS’ rival, the entrenched and corrupt Fatah organization made by Yasser Arafat’s grasping hands, was quick to trumpet all allegations of HAMAS brutality in the takeover. They’ve as much as promised a state of siege against Gaza, doling out enough cash to win what little favor it can from the common Palestinians while standing tough against any real cooperation or talk of reforming a unity government with HAMAS.

Outside observers might wonder why Abbas is stalling, when his nascent country is literally divided. The reason is that no sooner than HAMAS cut the lands run by the Palestinian Authority government - though occupied at leisure by the Israeli military - in half, foreign aid from all the western nations that had been cut off since HAMAS was elected began rolling in. Now Abbas doesn’t have any real control over his own militias; he has shown no capacity for actual improvement of Palestinians’ lives or substantial moves towards statehood through negotiation with Israel; he doesn’t, as the conflict two weeks ago showed, even have the capacity to run or defend his government. But he will be a favorite of the cameras now that he’s free to call his former colleagues in the Palestinian government “murderous terrorists”. He will be championed as the lone rational voice in the wilderness of occupied Palestine. And, most importantly for him, he will be able to indefinitely bilk the West of aid money to keep he and his Fatah pals rolling in dough and clinging to power.

This doesn’t give HAMAS a pass either. They’ve been as hardline as ever, but only if you buy into the spin of Abbas and the West do they sound as unreasonable as HAMAS - who has as a party platform the destruction of Israel - customarily sounds. Take note of some of the above points. First, they were denied foreign aid entirely. For those of you unaware, the Palestinian territories essentially subsist solely on aid and slave wages from Israel. Second, HAMAS was elected. Like it or not, the democratic elections chose HAMAS to lead the country - to staff ministries, lead the parliament, and fill all functions except for the highest executive powers that Abbas is now all too happy to exploit, like dissolving the government, enforcing martial law “state of emergency”, and sopping up aid money.

Which brings us to why HAMAS fought to seize Gaza in the first place. The reason is because Abbas and Fatah, such as they are, refused to let any of HAMAS’ people into the Palestinian law-enforcement and military forces which they had exclusive control over. Take a hard look at that, reader. Both sides of our esteemed aisle got their blood up when allegations of vandalism by the outgoing Clinton Administration officials against the White House hit the air waves. Imagine now if the Democrats had controlled not just the White House, but all of the armed forces and police, and refused to let any Republicans serve.

HAMAS first responded by entreaties. Then by negotiations. Finally, after Fatah militias began trading fire with them in the streets of Gaza, they took over. Again, this is not to say that HAMAS is the very soul of logic, but it entirely dispels the notion that Abbas, as he would like to claim, is playing fair. In fact, the last major incursion against the Israelis in Gaza, detailed in an earlier post on this weblog, was not by HAMAS but by one of Abbas’ own Fatah militias!

The chain’s links are easy to follow - HAMAS wins the popularity contest and the government because of Fatah recklessness, corruption and mismanagement. Fatah and the west shut HAMAS out. HAMAS seethes for the better part of a year and then, responding to provocation, takes over. Now they, and not the equally murderous and far more uncontrollable Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade of Fatah, are the “murderous terrorists”. And now Abbas, safe in his West Bank isolation, can play the satrap of the West with the whole of the Palestinian Authority living on his till and the whole of the West casting him as the great white hope.

Meanwhile, a similar slugfest is spiraling around the American airwaves. Yesterday Elizabeth Edwards called into Hardball with Chris Matthews to rake Ann Coulter over the coals for saying:

“If I’m going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I’ll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot,”

A stiff glance at that quote will detect the inference that it requires a larger context. In fact, Coulter was talking about how her earlier comment about Edwards - the notorious “faggot” remark - was itself taken out of context. When she voiced the nasty jab at Edwards, it was in discussing how certain terms were unallowable under the social standards of political correctness. Well, she certainly proved her own point. It is unallowable. Except if, like Ann Coulter, your livelihood thrives on that kind of scandal and divisiveness. “Commentators” - and I use the term very lightly - like Coulter depend on attacks on her to get the media buzzing, get the blog posts up - yes, like this one - and get the TV appearances rolling in.

Her point about Edwards being killed was, in fact, a criticism of the media finding Bill Maher’s comment allowable whereas her remark employing ‘faggot’ was not. In that criticism, she cited Maher as wishing Cheney had been killed in a terrorist attack. Thus, she reasoned to Good Morning America’s viewership, she would in the future refrain from using the term ‘faggot’ against an adversary, and simply wish they were killed in a terrorist attack.

But Maher did not say that at all. His discussion was, like Coulter’s, about what kind of political speech was allowable. Though pressed into a certain sympathy for the opinion that Cheney’s demise would bring about an end to the military adventurism for which the Vice-President is credited, he was ultimately asking whether or not people posting on the internet - not commentators, nor politicians, nor even bloggers, but respondents to blogs - had the right to say they wished Cheney dead.

All of this is lost in the discourse. And Elizabeth Edwards’ remarks of censure against Coulter, urging her to tone down the rhetoric, were not the end of the pot-stirring either. As is always the case, it cast more attention on Coulter’s inflammatory comments, thus giving her more incentive to voice them. And as for the Edwards side, they immediately posted the comments on their campaign website, got to talking to the press about it, and are profitting vastly as well.

Here we see another chain of spin’s links strangling us: Radical opinions on a website are discussed by Bill Maher. Maher is pressed into stating a position, which is then radicalized by his opponents. Coulter plays off of Maher’s comment, making it sound radical and using it as an excuse to make herself seem more radical. And finally, Elizabeth Edwards and the ailing Edwards campaign raises a loud cry against radicalism that they have exploited to leap to the fore of the election coverage.

Compare us with the Palestinians. Are the stakes as high? Is it, because we have a functioning system of government and they do not, just entertainment? Is it life and death for them, but just good prime time and watercooler talk for us?

It is life and death for everyone.

This kind of twisting of fact, exploitation of distortion and relentless divisiveness is not just throttling the desperate Occupied Territories. Our own government suffers. Budget battles loom, our Iraq legislation is as much a quagmire as that of the Iraqi parliament itself, and domestic initiatives bog down. And this is not only important because it is our country that suffers - it is important because when the world’s superpower languishes, order in the world languishes. Global credibility of America’s leadership is at an all time low. Aid is dysfunctional. Strategic power is diluted and fettered.

Not all this is the problem of George Bush. Remember who voted to give him his war powers and what powers were voted for. In the case of so many of the Executive’s blunders, we now hear his deriders claiming, “We supported him because we did not know”. That is nonsense. The information was out there. The reason we did not hear it then is the same reason as we do not hear now:

The clamor is deafening.

At the core of America’s global woes, we have its ventures in the Middle East. At the core of the Middle East conflict, inspiring and uniting generations of Islamist radicals and anti-American nationalists, we have the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. And at the core of that crisis, the complexities we need to unravel to solve it are being drown by a power elite exploiting the spin. To defeat the disease known as The War On Terror, the cancer of the Palestine crisis must be conquered.

And where is America’s political will - its voting public - in this?

Too busy debating what their favorite soapbox crier - Coulter or Maher - did or did not say.

——————–

Care to see what they did say? See here:

Coulter

Maher

Edwards

But for an even better read, check out how the HAMAS/Fatah feud is already deepening the battle lines of The War On Terror:

Helping Abbas Hurts Real Peace Negotiations

It Also Foments Further Division In The Arab World, Making Them Either Martyrs For Islam Or Traitors

Harry Reid, who I’ve yet to hear a positive remark from since his ascension to Majority Leadership in the House, now expressed dismay with the military leadership of the war in Iraq. Harry and his fellow Democrat, Ellen Tauscher, both made some summary and damning remarks against the leadership, particularly Pace. And while this speaks to the frustrations of the American people it does not, as Congress’ catastrophic approval ratings suggest, do anything to present the reason these people were elected - a solution to those frustrations. Really, all it seems to do is underscore what people increasingly feel - that whether from the White House or the Congress, their stances on the war are a rigged game, their vision a single tunnel.

Reid said that General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “had not done a very good job in speaking out for some obvious things that weren’t going right in Iraq.” That may well be true. And surely Republican pundits will soon talk about how this is a venomous assault on our troops, evocative of the careless and soul-scarring criticisms leveled against the military in Vietnam by its detractors - and, of course, they will be wrong. Reid’s opinion comes from the fact that he, unlike any future critics, will have actually heard Peter Pace speak about the conduct in Iraq.

But that doesn’t stop Reid from getting the blood up of any reader. Condemning Pace and, later, expressing “concern” over Petraeus’ possible bias in light of some positive comments Petraeus made about Iraq to USA Today, may not be mud-slinging of the highest order. They sound more like comments on a 5th grader’s report card. Why they aggrivate is something that most Democrats - even the Grand Dame Hilary Clinton - seem either unable to grasp or unwilling to address. They offer nothing better.

Few Americans now trust Bush to handle the war well, and rightly so, but many don’t just assume that the Congress that authorized him or cast ineffectual jabs his way has any more command of the situation. We do not assume, Mr. Reid, that your authority to criticize the military leadership is any wiser because you, like the President, have not shown us anything to support. Congress would do well to look at its ratings and figure why they are lower still than this disaster of an executive. They would come to the conclusion that those that resolutely support our illusory strengths are still more popular who solely support our real fears.

It’s a shame. Reid sets himself up as a strawman for advocates of a blank-check support of the war to hack at. Any who cluster to his banner get it right in the face too.

Ellen Tauscher has been part of the spearhead of efforts to get legislation going that would give troops the means to counter IEDs. Her actual comments in condemnation of the surge specifically mentioned that providing the proper armor to the troops - which we both have and know to be much more effective - should be the pre-requisite for their deployment. But now, standing beside Reid and slinging mud at Pace, she too joins the bandwagon of the discredited and the fatally dreary.

Pace gets it from Tauscher first for his comments against gays. He apologized for those comments, even going so far as to writing a personal letter to her. This does not make Rep. Tauscher look very nice. Subsequent - soon to be headlining - criticism was that Pace was in “dereliction of duty” for supporting the President’s policies.

Seen through the partisan lens, people are going to assume Tauscher is some anti-military softie who’s just taking a swing at someone in uniform. They’ll assume by “policies”, she means all policies, and may not be alluding directly to her complaint that we should prioritize the two-month process of armoring the troops before the surge. They will not know of her support for increasing military pay and survivor benefits to the families of fallen troops - a measure Bush said he would veto - and think she is just another shrill and strident note in the chorus of empty criticism.

Rightly so. These people have themselves to blame. Yes, some, like Tauscher, have spoken for incidental solutions, like the armoring aspect. And yes, surely they are not as knee-jerk as their critics will make them out to be, like Reid. But when they take the podium or pause on the steps of the Capitol Building to speak to reporters, they decide whether to tear into the Pentagon or to talk about a plan.

As I’ve said many times before, there are plans. To an extent it falls to the American people to listen - as the advocates of these plans, such as Joe Biden and Tommy Thompson, put them forward. But if the Democratic leadership truly wants to be our leaders, then it is their responsibility to lead us to these better ways.

General David Petraeus’ record for proficiency is outmatched only by his record of versatility. He has been thrown into roles that ranged from analyst to base commander to assistant to combat leader with much official preparation, and shown himself to be extraordinary in each. Now he faces his greatest challenge yet - succeeding at a task which none of his superiors, Congress or the Administration, seem willing to win at any cost.

His appearance in Washington to speak before Congress coincided with the gesture of hamstringing by that esteemed body. Now a timeline for troop withdrawal - which amounts to telling the enemy when they’ll be allowed to claim victory, should they so choose - has been thrown in along with the protracted refusal to fund Petraeus’ forces. Meanwhile, Bush has made some concerted but fatalistic overtures towards talking with the state poised to be the future inheritor of Iraq, Iran. But this diplomacy, which had been recommended from the beginning and has been a critical problem since nuclear programs and the Lebanon conflict flared up two years ago, may be too little, too late. Already Arab states that have been traditional supporters - read: recipients of billions in business and unqualified financial aid - such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt have looked at Bush’s track record of dismissive negligence to diplomacy and thrown their hands up.

This is the situation Petraeus is in - one in which his higher ups seem dead set on a course to bring him down. But with a combination of rock-ribbed will and inspiring innovation, he has presented nothing but progress in reply.

His reports have been fair and objective - not afraid to address the impact of the big number bodycounts that insurgents have been driving for in response to the surge restricting their actions, nor afraid to shed light on the Iraqi government’s hindering divisions, while still demonstrating a way to overcome these problems and achieve his mission. And his actions have shown determination - in the case of improved Baghdad security - and a focused brilliance.

One aspect of that is that Petraeus has gone after the terrorists on their own playing field - the collective consciousness. He’s opened up a way for the world at large to see exciting victories for our side, just as the insurgents have for theirs, via the ‘net. He didn’t need big funding, or a bill of approval to drag its pork-inflated bulk under the pen of the Democratic Congress; he uses, as he always has, whatever he has at hand and he gets it all done better than expected.

I strongly encourage any interested in getting the proper level perspective on the war to view this site:

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=MNFIRAQ

Even if you accept it as the propaganda that it is - the counterweight to the insurgent horror stories and US media’s sensationalist hand-wringing - and so dismiss its potential to turn opinion on the war around where it counts, it is still a site to see. Like Leonidas at Thermopylae and Churchill after the Battle of France, it is that rare testimony that life can not just endure, but flourish, in times of deepest darkness: the best of men in the worst of times.

A recent spate of headlines has my hackles up, and brings again to light that the media’s job nowadays it not to be informative but provocative.

Answers do not get people turning the page nearly as well as questions. Questions that make you scared or angry, doubly so. Check out the questions these raise:

Giuliani warns of ‘new 9/11′ if Dems win

Pelosi Won’t Attend Petraeus Briefing

It seems like, their noses wet with the blood from the VA tragedy, the media is more eager than ever to keep the frenzy going. For neither of these headlines tell the whole story - only enough to get the pulse racing.

First off, in Giuliani’s statements, he doesn’t mention a “new 9/11″. And his comments are more about Democrats wanting to go on the defensive, and the defensive being the wrong stance. But the writer makes sure that the readers think he’s going right for the other party’s jugular with great, gory jaws of generalization, using statements like this:

“If we are on defense [with a Democratic president], we will have more losses
and it will go on longer.”

Now in actuality, he hadn’t yet mentioned a Democratic president. Which means, in actuality, without writer Roger Simon’s slant, Rudi said:

“If we are on defense, we will have more losses and with will go on longer.”

Not nearly so stimulating as a full-frontal attack on another party, using threats of dooming America, now is it?

On the other side of the aisle, the Pelosi article makes one think she’s snubbing Petraeus totally, as if a Versailles artiso not deigning to receive him at her court.

But the article at least goes on to admit:

A Pelosi aide said the speaker on Tuesday requested a one-on-one meeting with
Petraeus but that could not be worked out. He said their phone conversation
lasted 30 minutes.

…before returning to stirring the political pot to a fever pitch with fiery statements about her actions.

Now, granted, Nancy better have a damn good excuse. For the sake of her own integrity, if not for her party’s. Unanimous approval of Gen. Petraeus - if the Democrats’ actions as a party are any indication - meant only that they all agreed on him to be their sacrificial animal. There’s been no support for his plan or him since.

I would posit that they unanimously approved him because they don’t care who captains a ship they’re going to sink. They’re opening the shuttlecocks on “Bush’s war” anyway.

But regardless of the conflict between the Democrats’ stance on the war and Petraeus’, Pelosi did not show utter disinterest in meeting with him. What kind of good news would that make, though?

This has been endemic for awhile, but recent years - particularly the Iraq conflict - has brought the media’s ravenous appetite for discord and decay to levels that threaten the course of human events.

The media shoved the case for the Iraq war down our throats, even though they knew full well of reports that contradicted the Bush administration’s evidence and of prominent strategians speaking out about the dangers of occupying the country. They did this because violence sells. And that means the only thing better than a war with a clean ending is a war that doesn’t end.

Let’s face it, World War II was a “good war” for this country, if such a thing as a good war is possible. But not for the media. Not like Vietnam. In Vietnam, the media became aware that they could not only exploit the endless cycle of violence to sell more papers with gore than with greatness, they could also direct the course of events.

Yes, we should challenge our leaders. But it is increasingly important to challenge the institution that would lead us to opinions about them.

“Fight fire with fire” never made too much sense to me as a proverb, and it makes absolutely no sense when it comes to solving gross mismanagement.

Congress just went on a break without sending the emergency war funding bill to Bush. This is not a good thing.

I get that Congress doesn’t want a ‘blank check’ war, but, sorry, folks, you signed it back in 2003. Now is not the time to back out by denying him funding.

This is especially true since the gripe by /everyone/ in the know - grunts, Generals, any strategic mind that’s not a neo-Con - is that the primary problem with the war from the beginning has been that Bush didn’t send enough troops or material for an occupation.

Now he’s /finally/ got the message and /this/ is the moment they cut him off at the knees?

“Bush under supplied the troops and got us into this mess. Now let’s cut off their funding altogether when they have a better plan than ever.” Not good thinking.

Oh, but worry not - the Democrats say that it’s not /so/ much of an emergency:

Unless he can sign a bill by mid-April, he said, the Army will be forced to consider cutting back on training and equipment repair. The problem will grow even more dire if Congress does not send him a bill he supports by mid-May, Bush said.

Democratic leaders, while eager to show backing for the troops, say Bush is overstating the consequences of missing those deadlines. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service says the Army has enough bookkeeping flexibility to pay for operations in Iraq well into July.

“Into July” - what a comfort. Now the useless political wrangling can go on for months instead of weeks.

As for the length of the war…well, there’s no telling, considering that what gains the Surge Plan has secured might dry up while Congress is flashing its muscle, teasing our troops with turning off the tap.

Nancy Pelosi’s sitdown with President al-Assad can achieve little but further isolating and shaming the administration in Washington. And Washington should be ashamed. It’s been too long - 2005 - since they sent any top delegation to this most-crucial Baathist nexus of strife, and have habitually done nothing positive or engaging to direct that nation in flux. But Pelosi should be ashamed as well.

The chatter in Washington these days about “showing the President a better way” holds no water from the perspective in global strategy. Our allies and enemies abroad don’t see the Democrats as the cavalry, rushing in to save the imperilled world from unilateral barbarism. They just see an America split by internal strife, and a hazardous executive with its hands not tied, but merely encumbered. Put plainly, they just see weakness.

I’m all for diplomacy. It has to be done from a position of strength. Pelosi’s independent delegation to the Middle East - no matter how well planned out or how necessary the dialogue - is little more than a sop to those who think Democrats will undermine Bush at any cost. She may think that she’s laying the groundwork for future talks, either by this administration or the next. The fact is, that’s just not true - not as true as the clear message of divisiveness it sends to the world.

She said she brought a message to Assad from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that Israel was ready for peace talks with Syria. Assad gave assurances that “he’s ready to engage in negotiations for peace with Israel,” Pelosi said. She later left Syria, heading for Saudi Arabia, the next leg of a Mideast Tour.

Great - he’s ready to engage. Too bad he’s not doing it with the inspiration or presence of the White House, which is about the only force in the world that could achieve anything on this serious matter. And al-Assad will not just want, but need that kind of protection and support if he’s going to so much as move a finger for Middle East peace.

The same goes for the Saudis and the Israelis. Knowing that a thin Congressional majority stands behind them - maybe - is not going to let these nations’ leaders sleep more peacefully.

It’s not because they’re venal and entrenched. Not necessarily. Consider if you were in Bashar al-Assad’s position. The man’s a former opthamologist. The Air Force - and its intelligence arm, which has based Syria’s regional power on links with the actions of groups like HAMAS and the Iraqi Baathists - put his father in power. They kept him there and they kept him in line. Bashar knows that if he pushes to hard to shake the machine of terrorism that the Syrian intel and Air Force has going on, that machine will chew him up and replace him.

Unless, of course, he gets support. But he hasn’t. His reign began with an immense liberalization which, without support from Washington, has been abridged and languished. He, like his father, even more so, has asked for help from the White House. He’s got only silence.

Silence and things like this:

“A lot of people have gone to see President Assad … and yet we haven’t seen action. He hasn’t responded,” Bush told reporters soon after Pelosi arrived in Damascus on Tuesday

“A lot of people” would be the then-Deputy Secretary for Defense, Richard Armitage, two years ago. He showed up to holler at Bashar about the Syrian’s leaky border with Iraq, and offered zilch in way of substantial security cooperation or diplomatic assistance. Before that, nothing. We don’t even have an ambassador there, out of protest. Protest? We’re in a war. You either talk or you fight; make allies or make casualties. Syria’s intel is glutting Hizb Allah and seeding Baathists into Iraq, and we’re sending neither words or bombs.

Bombs won’t help. Words will. Backing reform in the Middle East means dealing with people who want to see change and can actualize it at home - not the Achmed Chalabi exiles, but the Bashar al-Assads. We’ve ignored that opportunity for seven years. We blew it with Iran, and got Achmedinajad as a result.

Pelosi should be ashamed on account that her trip does, indeed, make America look weak, divided and inept - undercutting the very strength she would hope to make a change in the Middle East. And Bush should be ashamed as well, as the man in charge, for not doing the right thing and engaging Syria with both hands, whether of friendship or of violence.

She can’t show him the way ahead. That’s not how it works - like it or not, he’s our leader. The responsibility to do the right thing is where it has always been: In his hands.

This link on the Drudge Report just popped up to prod an already feisty public with more provocation:

PELOSI DIPLOMACY? Syrian officials claim key role…

Now everyone from the Beltway to Tehran will be tossing invective and political capital around, debating whether Pelosi freed the hostages with a wink and a nod. Why? Because whether the article has that implication or not, rabble-rouser Drudge just put it in your head and lit the fuse.

The article mentions her once. To put context to where one of Syria’s officials was speaking from. Once.

And it specifically says:

He said Syria had been asked “to help positively in the issue of British” crew members since their March 23 seizure by Iran in the Persian Gulf.

“Since”. Not “since Nancy came to town”. Since the 23rd. Which only makes sense, considering that Iran and Syria are like chatty soccer moms when it comes to diplomacy - talk to one and you’re talking to them both.

If Britain talked to Syria, considering Syria aches under EU sanctions, that might get something done. But Pelosi? What’s she going to offer - Syrian labor gets first pick of Schwarznegger’s new highway bond projects? Or further annoying Bush? She’s doing that anyway.

So don’t stir this pot, Drudge. Sure, it gets all the right names in the papers, but it makes a connection for people that’s not only unrealistic and provocative, but distracting and pretty damn far-fetched.