Thank goodness for professional journalists
I’ve noted before the habit the media has of using “supposedly” to cast doubt on terror charges in situations where the neutral “allegedly” is called for. Another obvious gambit is to use the word “claimed,” rather than “said” or “stated,” to cast doubt on a speaker’s assertion.
In this case, it’s a military report that violence has fallen dramatically off in Iraq since the surge began:
Violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq has fallen to its lowest level for 18 months, the deputy American commander claimed today.
The authors can’t really find a substantive objection to the numbers, so they just kind of randomly throw this out:
But US Democrats point out that much of this analysis is contradicted by independent studies, while the anti-war group Moveon.org branded Gen Petraeus as “General Betray Us” in a full page newspaper advertisement which accused him of “cooking the books” for the White House.
… again confirming the sneaking suspicion that Democrats see themselves as the enemy in this war, and randomly repeating the baseless slander on General Patreaus from MoveOn.org.
Thank goodness for professional journalists. Who else would take a press release from the military and frame it in hostile, mindless drivel for our reading pleasure?
Hillary’s slander pander
Clinton voted against a symbolic Senate measure condemning MoveOn.org’s slander of General Patreaus. More pandering to the Hard Left fringe.
MoveOn’s “General Betray Us” ad, the resolution states, “impugns the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all the members of the United States Armed Forces.”
Clinton and Dodd voted against it, and can prepare for some Netroots love. Also, at this point there’s nobody stirring on the right in the primary, though you can expect to hear about this piece of symbolic politics in the general, if Hillary’s the nominee.
Biden and Obama were absent.
A Sister Souljah moment that wasn’t
Richard Cohen, a reliable but generally thoughtful liberal, is disappointed at Hillary’s caving on the MoveOn.org slam on General Patraeus. Hillary of all people — whose husband Bill made a defining break with his Sister Souljah moment in 1992, in which he repudiated that grotesque racist comments of a hip hop queen, and thereby solidified his credentials at the center — should have known better.
Here’s what Cohen has to say:
The MoveOn.org ad was the moment for Clinton to rise above hackdom. It was a moment for her to insist that the business of politics, not to mention governing, is made even uglier and more difficult when people who merely differ with one another resort to insult. It was a moment for her to say that an Army general, under orders and attempting to fulfill a mission, should not be so casually trashed - especially since she herself has been on the other side of the Iraq war issue and said things she must now regret. And it was a moment for her to trot out her favorite phrase and use it, not in her own defense for once, but in defense of someone else. That moment is gone now - maybe because for Hillary Clinton it never arrived in the first place.
Intriguingly, the MoveOn add was less a challenge to the Republicans or the General than it was to the Democratic candidates. It was a gauntlet thrown down by the Hard Left to the Democratic field, and none but Joe Biden had the guts to brush it aside.
Understatement of the day
Rules of engagement are sketchy when private security firms are deployed in war
Uh, yeah. There are a number of prominent organizations with experience in this arena, but I don’t think we’ll be looking to Al Qaeda or Hezbollah for guidance.
A stunning historical counterfactual
Looking at France now talking war with Iran, a fascinating historical counterfactual presents itself. Imagine if this French administration had been there in 2003. Rather than facilitating Saddam’s intransigence, they back the allies, or at least don’t stand in the way. The only reason Saddam refused to buckle on inspections was because the French and the Russians stood athwart the threat and assured him that they would prevent the invasion. Had the French been neutral or supportive, the Russians would probably have pulled back. But even failing that, Saddam would certainly have seen that, without French opposition, the Blair-Bush invasion would occur. Self-preservation would then dictate that he buckle.
I think this is far from fanciful. The anti-war French administration made the war inevitable by falsely signaling to the dictator that he could safely flout the allies. A France in line with the allies would have prevented the war by properly signaling to Saddam that he had no choice.
Ignatius on how it ends
Good piece today in WaPo by David Ignatius. Judicious and thoughtful. Recognizes the risks, and the imperatives. He can be judicious, because he’s not vying for the Democratic nomination. He writes,
What you think about Iraq today is partly a measure of what you’ve thought in the past. That said, my sense was that Petraeus and Crocker made a decent case for continuing a while longer with America’s trial-and-error effort to reconstruct the nation we shattered in 2003. Just as important, they also signaled the beginning of the end of this uncertain mission by recommending that a drawdown of American troops begin this year.
And he concludes:
Petraeus and his team understand, too, that this war is about people — and helping them one by one to break the cycle of intimidation. When I asked Col. H.R. McMaster, a key Petraeus adviser, to name a turning point in Anbar, he cited the day in February when al-Qaeda deposited at a Ramadi hospital an ice chest containing the severed heads of the children of several sheiks who had been cooperating with the United States. Rather than submitting to this barbarous act, the enraged sheiks deepened their alliance with the U.S. military.
We need to be honest about what’s happening now in Iraq: Local solutions are better than no solutions; tribal power is better than terrorist intimidation; pop-ups can be better than the preplanned models. But Petraeus’s ad hoc, ground-up security framework is not the same thing as stabilizing the country. In the time remaining, he has to pull things together as best he can — connect local successes to provincial and national institutions; extend the Sunni rebellion against extremists into the Shiite regions; break the control that Shiite militias exert over the Interior Ministry and the police.
We do know how this is going to end: with U.S. troops returning home. The question is what they will leave behind. It’s likely to be a ragged, patchwork quilt, and there isn’t much time left to stitch it together.
Lindsey Graham takes Iraq seriously
Lindsey Graham is a favorite whipping boy of the right, often for good reason. He often seems to be a McCain wannabe just for the sake of it, or more for the sake of gaining the admiration of an elite establishment alienated in the Lewinsky affair, when he was a manager for the House case in the Senate.
But I am very impressed with the cogency and focus of his approach to the Patreaus hearing, as outlined by David Broder here. Unlike most questioners–including Obama–he used his time to draw out some very focused responses and establish a beachhead for real progress — underlining the urgency of success while remaining less than giddy about the probabilities:
When I talked with Graham on Thursday, he said he had asked those questions because “I am sick and tired of people posing choices between the two extremes; I want reality-based policy. [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid is as bad as Rumsfeld was in rejecting reality. He said in April that the war is lost, and he refuses to accept anything else.”
But Graham said that he thought Crocker was “making a pretty major statement that the clock is running out on the Maliki government — and we can have an effect on it by what we do here.”
“There are alternatives,” he said — Shiite political leaders who are willing, for example, to tour the Baghdad jails with Graham and be photographed with Sunnis who are protesting the imprisonment of so many of their coreligionists. “The good news,” Graham said, “is that Kurds and Sunnis and Shiites are ready to play politics. Judges feel more secure because of the surge, and that is important, because all of them have experienced rough justice.
“What we do can affect the outcome. But if we don’t see progress on two of the three big issues — oil revenues, de-Baathification, provincial elections — in the next 90 days, it may not happen. And Iraq could be a failed state.”
I respect his reasoned analysis, and I’m surprised and disappointed at how rare it is in Congress.
That’s a plan?
Picking on Obama’s foreign policy follies is like shooting fish in a barrel. Take this beaut, for example:
In a speech Wednesday, Obama offered his most detailed plan yet for getting troops out of Iraq, calling for the withdrawal of at least one of the 20 brigades (each made up of about 3,500 soldiers) in Iraq every month starting now, with all combat troops out by the end of next year.
I always thought a plan meant some sense of objective and a strategery for getting there. If his objective is to get the troops out, come what may, why straggle them out like that? Where is the logic of that arbitrary figure? What is the objective of those lingering behind?
At what point in this “plan” are the remaining troops simply inadequate to do anything but guard the airport for the next brigade waiting for his absurd schedule? And at what point is the sectarian genocide throughout the country we have left behind so terrifying that we begin pumping troops back in, as we recoil in shame at what we have done?
Joe Biden has a plan: partition the country and build sustainable self-governing sections. Obama’s proposal is not a plan at all. It’s an arbitrary number that bears no connection to any objective, strategy or any reality or contingency.
I used to think Obama was simply naive and inexperienced. I am increasingly convinced that he is dangerously and irredeemably shallow and unfit.
Al Qaeda doesn’t get it. Neither does the AP.
Once in awhile–say, 3 or 4 times a day–I come across a piece of dumb attack journalism so obviously biased and ignorant I want to puke. Here’s the AP in some weird little story without a byline — so it must be straight news, right? — apparently some kind of handy dandy sidebar.
The headline is “A look at Bush’s assertions about Iraq.” Note the objectivity, the respect, the shred of benefit of the doubt there? Neither did I. Then here’s the substance:
BUSH SAID:
“Anbar province is a good example of how our strategy is working,” Bush said, noting that just last year U.S. intelligence analysts had written off the Sunni area as “lost to al-Qaida.”
FACT CHECK:
Early Thursday, the most prominent figure in a U.S.-backed revolt of Sunni sheiks against al-Qaida in Iraq was killed by a bomb planted near his home.
It blathers a bit from there, but the clear implication is that this tragic assassination of the allied Sheik means that Al Qaeda just made some progress by knocking him off. That somehow their ability to kill one man negates all the good will generated in Anbar during the surge.
Memo to AP: the Sunnis turned against the terrorists precisely because of this kind of crap. Do you really think that more of the same is going to cower them now? Gee, doesn’t sound like it: Mourners seek revenge for death of Sheik Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi in Iraq
More than 1,500 mourners marched along the highway near the home of Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, who was killed along with two bodyguards and a driver Thursday by a bomb hidden near his house just west of Ramadi.Scores of Iraqi police officers and U.S. military vehicles lined the route to protect the procession as it followed the black sports utility vehicle carrying the coffin of Sattar, 35, who was also known as Abu Risha.
“We will take our revenge,” the mourners chanted along the 10 kilometer, or six mile, route to Sattar’s family cemetery, many of them crying. “We will continue the march of Abu Risha.”
I don’t think the Al Qaeda SOBs will be smirking about this one for long. But don’t expect the AP smirkers to know the difference.
British Iraqi interpreters targets in Basra
The scandal is that the Brits still haven’t yet reversed their decision to deny asylum to Iraqis who worked with them for years. Now these guys are being warned to leave or die. This one narrowly escaped when the “militia,” as the thugs call themselves, kidnapped his cousin instead of him. Realizing their mistake, they demanded that he turn himself in. The family lied and said he was already out of Iraq. So they settled for ransom money.
Ahmed handed over all the money that he had saved over three years. The family asked a tribal leader to give it to the kidnappers and bring back the cousin so that they would not be cheated. The cousin returned home with a message for Ahmed: “If we find you anywhere in Basra we will kill you, but if you come to us and give us information we will let you live.”
Ahmed has now sent his wife and one-year-old daughter to a relative’s house far from Basra and intends to stay on the al-Shaibah base. He said that if the Government did not grant him asylum in Britain he would have to seek refuge in another country.
“I’m very frightened,” he said. “The militias know all the interpreters in Basra. They waited for the British to leave so they could attack us . . . If the British don’t give me asylum I will have big problems because if I stay in Iraq I will be killed.”
It’s stories like this that leave me still relatively despondent about long term odds there. These people –here, the Shiites — are culturally so attuned to dying and dispensing death that there doesn’t seem to be sufficient breathing space for life.
Marc Rich pops up in the oddest places
Like a painful zit on Hillary’s nose. Now his name is showing up in an odd way involving the Iraqi Oil for Food scandal trial of a Texas oilman. What his name has to do with the case is far from clear, but it appears in the defendant’s address book, and its relevance is apparently being challenged in court:
He apparently left the book behind at the Houston airport in the spring of 2002, the lawyers said in asking a U.S. District judge to prevent use of the information at his trial.
The address book contains the name of Marc Rich, who fled the United States after being charged with tax evasion and fraud. In one of his last acts as president, Clinton pardoned the fugitive financier, touching off a firestorm.
The lawyers said letting jurors see the entry would be “totally irrelevant and inflammatory.”
“Wyatt’s relationship with Rich, if any, adds nothing to the government’s allegations of prohibited transactions with Iraq except the prejudicial association of their suspect with a notorious felon,” the lawyers wrote.
Utterly beside the point
I find it continuously bizarre that so many seemingly smart people are so obsessed with how we got into this war that they are utterly indifferent to what happens after we get out. One of the chief offenders here is Barack Obama, who every time he opens his mouth confirms that he is unfit for command:
As Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) put it in a statement sent minutes after Bush stopped speaking: “It is long past time to end a war that never should have started.”
Look, I’m willing to grant that, in hindsight, this war wasn’t the most brilliantly planned or even most necessary foreign policy adventure ever. To say the least. But you can stipulate that 2003 was as screw up without concluding in 2007 that retreat and defeat are the answer. In fact, the they are two utterly different questions.
Is Obama really so dense as to not realize this?
moveon.org ad a big so what
I don’t know what this ad is supposed to say. If you think the surge is a good idea, the ad does nothing to challenge you. If you think it was a bad idea, it does nothing to strengthen you. In sum, it does essentially nothing at all.
On the other hand, doesn’t look like it cost anything either. Enjoy:
Rudy calls out Hillary’s suspended disbelief
Got $65K? NYTimes is running a Fall Sale:
A conservative group, Freedom’s Watch, which supports Bush’s Iraq war strategy, also plans a print ad in the Times and has demanded the same $65,000 (€46,772) rate that the liberal group paid for its full-page ad. Giuliani is getting the same rate.
Hillary, who sat in the committee room circulating jr. high school notes with her pals looking for “good bites” and “best questions,” tipped her hand with her absurd suspension of disbelief, motivated by her deep concern for pancakes. Rudy’s not amused:
Krauthammer: Al Qaeda in Iraq IS Al Qaeda
Great column here by Krauthammer slicing many key points with his cold psychiatric scalpel. Key take away for me: the canard that Iraq is not about terror and Al Qaeda has got to go:
Having poisoned one country and been expelled from it (Afghanistan), al-Qaeda seized upon post-Hussein instability to establish itself in the very heart of the Arab Middle East — Sunni Iraq. Yet now, in front of all the world, Iraq’s Sunnis are, to use the biblical phrase, vomiting out al-Qaeda. This is a defeat and humiliation in the extreme — an Arab Muslim population rejecting al-Qaeda so violently that it allies itself in battle with the infidel, the foreigner, the occupier.
Anti-war dems [like that laughable lightweight Obama] hammer, hammer and hammer on the notion that because Iraq was not a center for Al Qaeda in 2003 that the battle in Iraq today is not war on terror.
They are still fighting and refighting the decision to go into Iraq. And they are so intent on finally winning that battle, they categorically refuse to recognize facts on the ground. It’s a psychopathology that calls for a psychiatrist. Fortunately, Krauthammer is in the house.
Can the NY Times be any more transparent?
NYT created a stink when it came out that the infamous MoveOn.org ad was bought at a steep discount. It could well be the case that this is in fact routine, especially with ad revenues in decline. Jeff Jarvis has some on point observations on this:
Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor who blogs on media at buzzmachine.com, said the key question for the Times was could any other political or advocacy group get the same rate under the same circumstances.
“The quandary the Times gets stuck in is they don’t want to admit you can buy an ad for that rate, no matter who you are,” Jarvis said, noting that with print advertising revenues in decline newspapers generally did offer big discounts.
On a more general note, Jarvis said U.S. papers should emulate their counterparts in Britain where, for example, The Guardian makes no effort to hide its liberal stance.
“In the U.S., I would argue newspapers should be more transparent and open about the views taken … and the (New York) Times is liberal,” he said.
I guess that would be refreshing in a sense, but it hardly seems necessary. Anyone who doesn’t see NYT already in that stance is either dumb or willfully blind.
Rover & Predators: a story of survival
Through the din, Harbin heard a radio crackle and a voice report that a Predator was flying overhead. Through the dust of the battle, Harbin looked out the window of the Humvee for a place to work his Rover kit. This would be no demonstration; this would be survival.He jumped from his vehicle and sprinted across the road toward another Humvee. The laptop’s battery was dead, and the Humvee had no power outlet. Undeterred, Harbin cut off the electrical cord and hot-wired the laptop to the Humvee’s battery.
As the laptop powered up, another rocket-propelled grenade burst nearby. Harbin reeled. His ears rang from the force of the explosion. He turned back to the Rover. The kit worked, linking with the Predator overhead. The plane’s camera sent an image of the surrounding area to the laptop’s screen.
Harbin searched the video, and pinpointed the insurgents, about 100 yards away. He yelled for the Marine captain and pointed to the enemy mortar position on the screen. The captain called in a strike. The Predator fired a Hellfire missile at the insurgents, killing them.
Iran’s meddling in Iraq: substance vs. symbol
The substance, as anyone watching carefully has known for many months, is that Iran is meddling heavily in Iraq, intent on undermining our mission there. General Petraeus confirms that in striking testimony:
“The evidence is very, very clear,” Petraeus said. He cited documents discovered during the capture in March of Qais Khazali, a Shiite Muslim militant with ties to the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the arrest of a deputy commander of Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese Shiite group supported by Iran. Petraeus said the evidence links Iran to an attack in Karbala in January that resulted in the deaths of five U.S. soldiers.
Under interrogation, Khazali was asked if he could have carried out that attack without Iranian support, Petraeus said in the news conference. “He literally throws up his hands and laughs and says, ‘Of course not,’ ” the general said.
The symbol, for the rabid anti-war left, is that Iran cannot be meddling in Iraq, because if they were it would serve as a rationale for U.S. action against Iran and that cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed. So in their tail-wagging-dog logic, they simply stipulate away the uncomfortable and obvious facts.
Bereft of ideas, devoid of substance
Any ideas about best questions?
Good bites.
[This pic is not photoshopped. HT: Doug Ross, via Don Surber.]
Obama disses the grown-ups
Obama? Obbbaaammmma! Put away you compact and look at the camera. It’s your turn to ask your “questions.”
It must be oddly frustrating for a Senator and Ambassador steeped in experience to be cross-examined by the crotchety mediocrities and wet-behind-the-ear pop icons who comprise the U.S. Senate.
Obama, for example, launches a long, mind-numbing tirade retracing ground from 2003 to the present–so as to remind us all that he didn’t vote for the war. Then he “stipulates” a handful of inane stipulations to the effect that the surge ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. He stipulates that the success in Anbar has been political, not military [I’m not kidding; I think he was reading his talking points upside down], ignoring the inextricable bond between the two.
At the end of this long, rambling pirouette, Obama finally asks one question, which merely serves to demonstrate that he was not been listening all along:
OBAMA: And if we’re there the same place a year from now, can you please describe for me any circumstances in which you would make a different recommendation and suggest it is now time for us to start withdrawing our troops? Any scenario? Any set of benchmarks that had not been met?
CROCKER: Senator, I described for Senator Sununu a little bit ago some of the things that I think are going to be very important as we move ahead.
OBAMA: Can you repeat those? And I know I’m out of time, so I’m just going to ask for both the general and the ambassador to answer.
Memo to the intellectual lightweight with the thin resume: the least you can do is listen and take notes when the grown-ups are speaking.
