Barack Obama and the Surge in Iraq

I'm betting the claim that Barack Obama was right about Iraq all along will be the dominant hard-left foreign policy meme throughout the fall.

In the postmodern world, neither the Bush administration, Senator John McCain, nor General David Petraeus deserve credit for the improvement of security in Iraq and the shift toward political accomodation. Indeed, for left-wing partisans, the increase in troops was never good policy, and an Obama administration will finally do the right thing with an immediate troop drawdown next January.

The challenge for the McCain campaign will be beat back that spin by successfully demonstrating Barack Obama's inferior judgment on war policy.

This morning's USA Today provides the talking points, noting that Obama's been spectacularly wrong about the surge:

In January 2007, America's adventure in Iraq seemed like a chaotic failure. The country was riven with sectarian violence, and al-Qaeda in Iraq had gained a foothold in western Anbar province. Attacks on U.S. troops were running well over 1,000 a week, and Iraqi civilians were dying at a rate of more than 3,000 a month.

In that context, President Bush's announcement that month that he planned to "surge" more than 20,000 extra U.S. troops into Iraq felt to many critics, including Sen. Barack Obama, like doubling down on failure.

A year and a half later, though, violence is down dramatically and there's a cautious hope that both the U.S. and Iraq could achieve an outcome once seemed out of reach.

The surge didn't do all of that; a cease-fire by Shiite militias and the switch by Sunni insurgents from attacking Americans to fighting al-Qaeda helped enormously. But the extra U.S. troops, brilliantly deployed by Gen. David Petraeus, have made a huge difference in calming the chaos. In doing so, it also contributed to the other developments.

Why then can't Obama bring himself to acknowledge the surge worked better than he and other skeptics, including this page, thought it would? What does that stubbornness say about the kind of president he'd be?

In recent comments, the Democratic presidential candidate has grudgingly conceded that the troops helped lessen the violence, but he has insisted that the surge was a dubious policy because it allowed the situation in Afghanistan to deteriorate and failed to produce political breakthroughs in Iraq. Even knowing the outcome, he told CBS News Tuesday, he still wouldn't have supported the idea.

That's hard to fathom. Even if you believe that the invasion of Iraq was a grievous error ... the U.S. should still make every effort to leave behind a stable situation. Obama seems stuck in the first part of that thought process, repeatedly proclaiming that he was right to oppose the war and disparaging worthwhile efforts to fix the mess it created. Hence, his dismissal of the surge as "a tactical victory imposed upon a huge strategic blunder."

The great irony, of course, is that the success of the surge has made Obama's plan to withdraw combat troops in 16 months far more plausible than when he proposed it. Another irony is that while Obama downplays the effectiveness of the surge in Iraq, he is urging a similar tactic now in Afghanistan.

As for the surge not producing sufficient political reconciliation in Iraq, it's true that efforts to integrate Sunnis into a Shiite-dominated political culture are only inching forward. But reconciliation takes many forms, and Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's military attacks against rogue Shiite militias in Basra and Baghdad's Sadr City were a hugely important signal to Sunnis....

Perhaps Americans don't expect their president to be right all the time. They do expect him to change course when he's proved wrong.

See also, "Candidates Spar Over Troop Surge and Iraq Chronology."

Image Credit: Michael Ramirez

The Commentocracy of Hate

"Okay, tell me something I don't know..."

This was my basic sense, while first reading through the Politico's feature article, "The Commentocracy Rises Online."

Except the article DID tell me something new.

The piece starts with the story of Erick Erickson of Redstate, who had his all of his personal contact information, including his work phone number, posted at Daily Kos in the comments thread:

Site moderators removed his information, but not before Erickson received a number of ominous phone calls and e-mail messages, including one from a writer who threatened to “rape my wife and unborn child.” He placed a call to the FBI in response, and nothing came of the threats.

“That was first time anything like that happened to me,” he says, “and I was really taken aback, but now it’s almost run of the mill.”

Behold the Commentocracy, where big ideas and rough remarks sit shoulder to shoulder, altogether transforming the nature of the Web and of journalism.

Okay, the "commentocracy." I'm hip ... the blogosphere's a rough place.

So rough, in fact, according to the Politico, that some top bloggers and mainstream news sites simply do without commenting - why waste the time and energy moderating a bunch of uncultured yahoos?

Not Daily Kos, though. Commenters there are essentially team members, community participants adding "content" to the blog:

Kos Editor Susan Gardner recalls her own hesitancy in posting comments when she started out as a reader on the site back in 2003. At the time, she says, there were only 8,000 users who had registered to comment, compared with more than 170,000 today.

Active commenters, though, remain a relatively small and self-selected group. “For every 10 who read,” Gardner continues, “one will sign up as a reader. And of every 10, only one will comment, and of every 10 who do, one will become a diarist.”

A ratings system allows readers to recommend their favorite missives, thus fashioning a commenting meritocracy, or at least hierarchy. “For the most part, what you do see is people are rising purely on merit or at least on popularity,” she said. “They’re giving community what the community wants, which is different than the outside world.“

Mindful that in the past, certain incendiary or inappropriate comments have been used, most famously by Bill O’Reilly, as though they represented the views of Daily Kos and all its readers, the community has vigilantly taken up the cause of self-policing against online dejecta, be it bigotry, impertinence or spam.

Frequent open threads on the front page offer commenters a high-profile outlet for whatever’s on their minds.

“Commenters aren’t just commenters on our site, like they are on Politico,” says Gardner. "They are creators of content.”

This is both revealing and highly significant.

As noted in "Progressivism Goes Mainstream?", Markos Moulitsas considers his blogging community as the mainstream of the Democratic Party, and the Kos kids certainly throw their weight around, for example, in pressuring the Austin-American Statesman to renounce its ironic front-page story covering last week's Netroots Nation convention.

The significance, though, is in what the Kos commentocracy signifies. While newspapers like the New York Times debate eliminating comment boards, the hate-filled threads at Daily Kos are considered legitimate intellectual content. The notion that Kos' comments are moderated is laughable. Sure, maybe some posts are taken down, but one can read entire threads, with hundreds and hundreds of comments, to find ready and vile examples of demonism.

Check out these examples from the Kos diary, "Lieberman Goes The Full Zell."

From "Dallas Doc":

Joe Lieberman has consistently advocated that Democrats respond to the lies, the manipulations, the tactical and strategic disasters of the Bush presidency by going along with everything the Boy King wanted. Not to do so, in Joe's mind, would cause vengeance to rain down on Democrats from the mighty Republicans. Is this not a doctrine of appeasement in its purest form?

Joe, of course, is consistent only in being a warmonger. He is a tool of right-wing Israeli politics, and a creature of defense industry contractors (big in CT). If our politics has descended to "Strong = eager to kill" then God help us all. He won't do much for Lieberkrieg.

And this one, from "Red State Progressive":

If Hell exists...

There is a special place for Joe Lieberman.

Also included are photoshopped graphic images, with one picturing Senator Lieberman as a "giant douche" bag, which is captioned, "No offense to douches intended..."

So, with Daily Kos we see the commentocracy as essentially the Wild West of secular demonology.

Where at others left-wing outfits, like the Huffington Post, the problem of hatred is recognized and remedied (Huffington Post frequently closes its entries to comments, for example, for its report on the Times Square bombing in March and after publishing its obituary for Jesse Helms more recently), at Kos the commentocracy of hate is celebrated as "creative."

Perhaps it might be the case that Daily Kos, and other "progressive" blogs will see their influence fade upon the accession of Barack Obama to power in January, should the Illinois Senator prevail in November.

It's wishful thinking to bank on such an outcome, but perhaps with a Democratic victory the demonology of progressive blogging will become little seen and not heard among the more civilized practitioners of online communications.

Anti-Militarism in the Academy?

Hugh Gusterson, at Foreign Policy, offers an interesting example of the anti-military ideology of the university professoriate.

As indicated at the essay, the United States is facing an exciting period in the history of the Middle East in which the Pentagon hopes to drawn on the wide-range of scholarly expertise found across the academy to inform foreign policy planning for a new era.

To meet the challenge, in April the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced the establishment of Project Minerva, a new public/private partnership to support basic research vital to the future security and well-being of the nation:

Throughout the Cold War, universities were vital centers of new research – often funded by the government – and also new ideas and even new fields of study such as game theory and Kremlinology. Federally funded low-cost loans and fellowships made graduate school broadly available for students like me.

As was the case at that time, the country is again trying to come to terms with new threats to national security. Rather than one, single entity – the Soviet Union – and one, single animating ideology – communism – we are instead facing challenges from multiple sources: a new, more malignant form of terrorism inspired by jihadist extremism, ethnic strife, disease, poverty, climate change, failed and failing states, resurgent powers, and so on. The contours of the international arena are much more complex than at any time during the Cold War. This stark reality – driven home in the years since September 11th – has led to a renewed focus on the overall structure and readiness of our government to deal with the threats of the 21st century.

Gusterson suggests that members of the academy, in earlier decades, became alienated from supporting Cold War research, particulary after the war and defeat in Vietnam:

At first glance, Minerva is a welcome breath of fresh air. Remember Donald Rumsfeld? The former defense secretary believed that technological dominance, not cultural understanding, was the key to victory in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But had Pentagon officials consulted anthropological experts on the Middle East before invading Iraq, they would have been warned that U.S. troops were unlikely to be greeted the way they were in France in 1945, and that, in the absence of Saddam Hussein, Sunnis and Shiites might well turn on one another.

Gates, to his credit, is much more interested than Rumsfeld was in mobilizing the human sciences in the “war on terror.” But the tragedy of his initiative is that the very thing that makes it so appealing—at last, the Pentagon is seeking expert input from the academy—could also doom it to failure.

Take anthropology, a field that holds important insights about religious extremism and terrorism. Many anthropologists simply will not apply for funding if it comes from the Pentagon. Their reasons will vary. Anthropologists already report being suspected of working for U.S. intelligence agencies when they do field research abroad, and they will be concerned that research subjects will refuse to talk to them if they have been openly funded by the U.S. military. Some will be concerned that the Pentagon will seek to bend their research agenda to its own needs, interfering with their academic freedom. Still others will be nervous that colleagues will shun them. But many will refuse simply on principle: Anthropology is, by many measures, the academy’s most left-leaning discipline, and many people become anthropologists out of a visceral sympathy for the kinds of people who all too often show up as war’s collateral damage. Applying for Pentagon funding is as unthinkable for such people as applying for a Planned Parenthood grant would be for someone at Bob Jones University. One thousand anthropologists have already signed a pledge not to accept Pentagon funding for counterinsurgency work in the Middle East.

Hmm, the "most left-leaning" discipline, eh? That explains a lot.

And I'm sure a quite few of these folks got some of those federally-funnded grants and loans as well...

Read the rest of Gusterson's piece. He notes that the Pentagon's loss of potential knowledge is a loss for the country as well.

The Obscenity of Spencer Ackerman

Not all left-wing bloggers have given up profanity in their blogging, which was an issue in debate at Netroots Nation.

This morning, in response to Katie Couric's story on Barack Obama's Iraq surge controversy, Spencer Ackerman exclaimed:

Dear press corps,

Please recognize that this is completely f**king wrong.

I'm still amazed at this kind of language among top-level bloggers, especially as Ackerman's directing his appeal to the Washington press corps, which abjures profanity in reporting as completely inappropriate.

Recall, though, for postmodern citizen journalists, explicity crude language is a way to add power to their attacks on the "enablers" of the mainstream press.

Yet, as I noted previously, "It's not as if the bloggers profiled have advanced their journalistic or political careers by deploying gutter language," with the main example being Amanda Marcotte.

I could be wrong about that, however. Maybe profanity, in the world of radical media reporting, is indeed an asset. Ackerman's case might support the conclusion, for while he was fired from the New Republic for inappropriate language and unprofessional behavior, he was immediately hired by extreme leftist Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect.

According to Clint Hendler:

In October 2006, Spencer Ackerman was a twenty-six-year-old associate editor at the New Republic. He had joined the magazine four years earlier and, since then, had reported from Iraq, been twice promoted, and co-written the story that may land Lewis “Scooter” Libby in prison....

Less than a year later, his boss Franklin Foer called and asked him to come in for a talk. Ackerman was working from home that day, maintaining the magazine’s baseball playoffs blog and posting a bit on Too Hot for TNR, his personal blog which he had just set up that weekend.

Ackerman says his relationship with Foer had begun to deteriorate eight months before, in March of 2006, when Foer, who was thirty-one at the time, was given the magazine’s top job by Martin Peretz, TNR’s then owner andeditor-in-chief.

“As I was on the bus on the way down, I thought, ‘This is it. I’m probably going to be fired.’ I’d thought that before, but this felt different,” says Ackerman.

This was different. Foer sat Ackerman down and told him that his behavior—both in the office and on his blog—had been unacceptable. His career at the magazine was over....

Over the years TNR has taken pride in being preternaturally iconoclastic, claiming to be the keeper of the liberal flame while thumbing its nose at progressive stances on health care, affirmative action, and the rulings of the Warren Court. But for the four years that Ackerman worked at the magazine, TNR was defined by its [pro-invasion] position on the Iraq war, the all-consuming debate of the era....

The magazine had become an ideologically difficult place for [Ackerman] ... to be. But, he says, the biggest difficulties came after Foer was promoted. “Frank and I used to be friends. Or I at least I thought we were,” Ackerman says. “Frank is not particularly interested in national security. I am. We had struggled to find an equilibrium.”

This led to what Ackerman diplomatically calls “a couple of heated editorial disputes.” The most notorious of these occurred after U.S. bombs killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June of 2006. At an editorial meeting, Ackerman warned the assembled staff that Zarqawi’s martyrdom might actually make things worse in Iraq. He was accused of being soft on the dead al Qaeda operative. So he demonstrated his hatred of Zarqawi by offering to “skullf**k” the corpse.

“The magazine is not filled with shrinking violets,” says Ackerman, recounting the incident. “I stand by it, damn it. I would skullf**k the guy if I could!”

There were other disagreements. Ackerman thought that his posts to the magazine’s group blog—The Plank, started six months after Iraq’d was shuttered—were getting undue editorial scrutiny. And he was disappointed that he was not invited to participate in a major Iraq roundtable to be published November 2006.

But by then Ackerman would be gone...

Ackerman was quickly hired by Meyerson, in a show of hard-left solidarity:

That night Ackerman went to the movies to see Fearless, a Jet Li film, with some friends. By the time the credits rolled, he had a message on his cell phone from Harold Meyerson, acting executive editor of the liberal—and more consistently antiwar—American Prospect, offering Ackerman a writing contract.

“It was an easy fit,” says Meyerson. “He’d fought the good fight at TNR on national security and the war, which isn’t an easy place to fight the good fight. . . . And if I was going to offer him this, I thought I should do it when it would cheer him up.”

It'd be hard to verify whether Ackerman would indeed perform necrophilia on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's corpse, although his casual use of such language and imagery at a New Republic staff meeting indicates a substantial mien of postmodernism probity for Ackerman, and his immediate employment at the American Prospect comes off as a sound endorsement of his practices.

Interestingly, not only is Ackerman rude and crude, he's also regularly and spectacularly wrong, especially in his false claim that the Anbar Awakening proceeded the surge.

Maybe the "f-bomb" isn't so compelling after all.

See also, SourceWatch, "Spencer Ackerman."

Lieberman: Christians for Israel are "Agents of Destiny"

Senator Joseph Lieberman spoke yesterday to Christians United for Israel, an organization led by the controversial Pastor John Hagee.

Lieberman's speaking engagement drew heavy fire from left-wing partisans, but the Connecticut Senator thanked the organization for its support:

On Tuesday, Lieberman told the group's members they were agents of destiny, and the cause was seeing successes. In Iraq, he said, Saddam Hussein has been replaced by "a growing, sometimes cantankerous Iraqi democracy that is overcoming the terrorists and the surrounding countries that wish to destabilize it, slowly taking its place among the family of responsible and democratic nations."

The senator also fell upon his frequent theme — the threat of Iran. "A nuclear Iran is a mortal danger to all our allies in the Middle East, Israel and Arabs, and it is a threat to us. A nuclear Iran would transform the balance of power in the region in the worst possible way. As Iran continues to expand the reach of its missiles, it will soon not just be the Middle East that is threatened, but Europe as well, and the United States."

Note that Paster Hagee has apologized for his earlier controversies.

Also, here's Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, of Efrat, Israel, on Hagee:

Pastor John Hagee is a towering leader in the Evangelical Church who has dedicated a great part of his enormously successful ministry to reaching out in love and loving-kindness to the Jewish people and the State of Israel. He has admirably defended our right to our historic homeland even when our enemies have attempted to disgorge us from our homes and drive us into the sea; he has praised the Lord for having imbued us, the "post-Holocaust dry bones of Ezekiel," with renewed life and vigor even when our arch-enemy and the arch-enemy of the free world has called us a "stinking corpse." He has organized Christian lobby groups for the only true democracy in the Middle East across the length and breadth of the United States even when a former American President and professors from Harvard and Chicago Universities have denounced our own lobbying efforts as un-American and anti-Democratic....

We are living in a world divided between those who believe in a God of love and peace, and those who believe in a Satan of Jihad and suicide bombers. Any attempt to marginalize and slander leaders of the camp of the former will only serve to strengthen the camp of the latter, with the future existence of the free world perilously hanging in the balance. And so I continue to proudly shout from the rooftops that this rabbi in Israel stands firmly alongside -his beloved friend, a true friend of Israel and the free world, Pastor John Hagee.

Lieberman himself is an orthodox Jew, and as the top supporter of Israel in American government, his appearance at Christians United is a powerful endorsement of the organization's good faith toward the Jewish state.

The lefties, of course, want to whip up a Wright-style scandal from Lieberman's relationaship to Hagee. See : Think Progress, Firedoglake, and Matthew Yglesias.

Anti-Semitism in the Arab World

I'm frankly amazed (or disturbed, even shocked, at the risk of cliché) at this anti-Semitic cartoon from Bahrain, which is one those included in the ADL's, "Anti-Semitism in the Arab/Muslim World:

For context, see my previous post, "Obama in Israel."

Hat Tip: Harry's Place

Obama in Israel

Why are Jews suspicious of Barack Obama? Jennifer Rubin notes that Obama's "expressed puzzlement at how American Jews could be wary of him."

Rubin discusses Obama's reception in Israel, and points readers to Calev Ben-David's essay at the Jerusalem Post, "A Harsh Welcome Message for Barack Obama":

Welcome to Israel, Senator Obama!

Although you haven't yet attained the White House, your hosts have still graciously prepared for you all the honors and activities usually received for visiting heads of state....

On top of all that, a special unexpected welcoming reception was arranged on Tuesday afternoon, by a young man of this city who seemed determined to deliver a message to you on the day of your arrival in Jerusalem.

Although subsequent investigation may prove different, there's good reason to believe Ghassan Abu Tir's bulldozer terror attack was deliberately staged as a greeting gift for you, Senator Obama.

He belongs to the same Jerusalem family clan as imprisoned Hamas official Muhammad Abu Tir, so he is likely to have had ties to radical Islamist elements. He was shot dead as he was driving his bulldozer up King David Street straight in the direction of the King David Hotel, which you were due to check into later in the day.

And the timing of the incident was logical, since such an attack would have been much harder to pull off after your arrival, when the heavier police presence on the street would have stopped Abu Tir's rampage even sooner than was the case.

What was the message, then, that Abu Tir was likely trying to deliver to you? Well, let's consider some of the few facts about him that we already know. His village of Umm Tuba is one of those fortunate Arab neighborhoods on the periphery of Jerusalem that is not cut off from the rest of the city by the security barrier. Thus it is one of the better-off Arab communities in the capital - just like Jebl Mukaber and Sur Bahir, the neighboring Arab villages that produced the perpetrators of the previous two terror attacks in Jerusalem, including the original bulldozer rampage just three weeks ago.

So keep in mind, Senator Obama, that the gainfully employed Abu Tir was probably not one of those Palestinians you spoke about earlier on your trip, whose motivation to carry out terror was primarily due to economic deprivation. Nor is he likely one of those who shared your dream to see a Palestinian state rise up alongside Israel.

His message to you was that some things are not negotiable, and some people do not really wish to be negotiated with, at least not on any terms but their own; that Israel's crime is not what it does or where its borders are, but its very existence; and that no matter which president sits in the White House, those basic - or, one might say, sacred - principles will remain unchanged.

Of course, Senator Obama, you already know all that, and Abu Tir has perhaps only done you a favor of sorts in giving you the opportunity to further demonstrate this understanding to the voters back home - especially those Jewish Democratic voters who care deeply about the security of Israel.

Yes, Senator Obama, we're well aware here that you're currently polling at about 60 percent of the American Jewish vote, some 20 points behind the percentage of this constituency that supported the previous three Democratic presidential candidates.

And while it's true that adding to that number would only constitute a small sliver of the overall vote, that might still make a difference in such crucial battleground states as Ohio - where your campaign just last week appointed a special Jewish-outreach coordinator - and Florida, whose popular Jewish congressman Robert Wexler is co-chair of your campaign there and has even been mentioned in recent weeks as a potential vice-presidential pick for you....

We know you've had your occasional difficulties with some in the Jewish community, and if chosen president you would also have differences with Israeli policy, just like all previous occupants of the White House. From the Israeli perspective, though, especially considering our own deep divisions, the details of your policies here and elsewhere in the region are of secondary importance.

The one thing that all Israelis can agree on is that whoever sits in the Oval Office must understand what a difficult and dangerous corner of the globe this nation finds itself in, one that would be so even if the Jewish State had never been founded.

Thus we need a U.S. president wise enough to understand the need for diplomacy, yes - but equally so, one strong and courageous enough to utilize America's incomparable might when diplomacy fails.

In short, we need a president who won't be bulldozed by those who hold in contempt the values that both the US and Israel stand for. That, Senator Obama, is the message you can send back home from Jerusalem, on the day after the blood spilled by Ghassan Abu Tir practically on your doorstep ran down King David Street.

Recall, though, that Obama has spent recreation time with Rashid Khalidi, a "critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights," who has served as an Obama fundraiser (see also, "Rashid Khalidi and the Risks for Obama").

Obama also hung out with Louis Farrakhan, participating in the Muslim hate-preacher's Million Man March.

Obama opposed the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, the congressional measure formally identifying Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization.

Not only that, Obama declared in May that Iran's hegemonic ambitions pose no "serious threat to the U.S.", and by extension to the state of Israel.

Given all of this, Obama's outward solidarity with Israel this week can be seen as another flip-flop: The Illinois Senator stated last year that the U.S. cannot military to stop genocide, while at Yad Vashem he's turned around to say "never again"!

Obama on genocide ... change we can believe in?

If one can be judged by their actions and words, Barack Obama seems an unlikely friend of Jewish people.

American Jews might keep this in mind as the November election approaches.

For the bulldozer attack, see "Construction Vehicle Attack in Israel."

See also, "Obama Sizes up Mideast Stage."

Photo Credit: "Senator Barack Obama at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem on Wednesday," New York Times.

All Hail McBama!

I frankly don't think folks anticipated the political implications of victory in Iraq.

It's a strange turn of events, where the candidate who was right all along is now a spectator in the media's adulation of Barack Obama. Thomas Friedman's even gotten to calling the Democratic nominee, "McBama."

Yet, interesting, the antiwar crowd remains determined to deny the surge had anything to do with Iraq's stunning achievement, which is the basis for the McBama phenomenon. To hear folks on the left, the strategic turnaround had entirely local origins, with the indigenous Anbar Awakening, for example.

Looking at the timelines on Anbar, the Weekly Standard offers a compelling rebuttal to the left's version of pre-surge Anbar provine:

As Frederick Kagan wrote in September 2007: “Anbari tribal leaders did begin to turn against AQI in their areas last year before the surge began, but not before Colonel Sean MacFarland began to apply in Ramadi the tactics and techniques that are the basis of the current strategy in Baghdad.”

If McCain was saying that Col. McFarland's counterinsurgency approach "began the Anbar Awakening" then that's pretty much on the mark. The "surge" after all is often shorthand for both the addition of U.S. troops as well as the adoption of a counterinsurgency strategy.

Of course, the official "surge" was ordered by President Bush in January 2007--four months after the Awakening began. Some are pointing to this statement as proof that McCain gets "his facts all wrong", as Matthew Yglesias writes.

But Yglesias's colleague Marc Ambinder writes that a charitable reading of McCain's statement is "that the surge helped the Anbar Awakening to succeed because the shieks could actually be protected."

Indeed, the surge did not midwife the Anbar Awakening--it kept the Awakening from being strangled in the crib. Here's how the Washington Post characterized a Marine intelligence report on Anbar from mid-November 2006:

The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda's rising popularity there [...]

Moreover, most Sunnis now believe it would be unwise to count on or help U.S. forces because they are seen as likely to leave the country before imposing stability.

So two months after the Anbar Awakening began, the province looked hopeless. Yet Yglesias contends that the surge was not largely responsible for the progress in Anbar:

This specific timing issue aside, we can see here the larger point that McCain doesn't actually seem to know what the surge was. But the surge troops were overwhelmingly sent to increase the level of manpower in Baghdad (i.e., not where the Anbar Awakening happened)

But Fallujah--in Anbar--is about 30 miles west of Baghdad. That's the distance between Washington D.C. and Dulles airport. Might not U.S. forces killing terrorists in Baghdad have reduced the level of violence in Fallujah as well as 30 miles farther west in Ramadi?

Furthermore, two additional Marine battalions were sent to Anbar, and it wasn't until they were deployed and the counterinsurgency implemented that the Anbar Awakening flourished.

The Awakening, Kagan wrote,

proceeded slowly and fitfully for most of 2006 and, indeed, into 2007. But when Colonel John Charlton’s brigade relieved MacFarland’s in Ramadi and was joined by two additional Marine battalions (part of the surge) elsewhere in Anbar, the “awakening” began to accelerate very rapidly. At the start of 2007 there were only a handful of Anbaris in the local security forces. By the summer there were over 14,000. [...] The fact is that neither the surge nor the turn of the tribal leaders would in itself have been enough to turn Anbar around — both were necessary, and will remain so for some time.

Of course, the hated Kagans will never be credited with being right about anything on Iraq, so the truth of the story will be like a giant Sequioa felled in a forest grove, silent but deadly.

More deeply, though, is the propensity of left-wing pundits and the mainstream press to posit Barack Obama as "right all along." You know, how John McCain's "adopted" Obama's plan for withdrawal. Or most recently, McCain's age increasingly reveals a propensity for gaffes.

Yet, beyond the tit-for-tat on media missteps, it's McCain who's been right all along, and with the meme now well established that Obama's "right" on Iraq, McCain needs to go with the flow to focus on exactly the details of the Obama foreign policy. The Washington Post, for example, indicates that Obama's wrong in his military proposals for Iraq:

THE INITIAL MEDIA coverage of Barack Obama's visit to Iraq suggested that the Democratic candidate found agreement with his plan to withdraw all U.S. combat forces on a 16-month timetable. So it seems worthwhile to point out that, by Mr. Obama's own account, neither U.S. commanders nor Iraq's principal political leaders actually support his strategy.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the architect of the dramatic turnaround in U.S. fortunes, "does not want a timetable," Mr. Obama reported with welcome candor during a news conference yesterday. In an interview with ABC, he explained that "there are deep concerns about . . . a timetable that doesn't take into account what [American commanders] anticipate might be some sort of change in conditions."

Further, on Iraq and the larger terror war:

Obama's account of his strategic vision remains eccentric. He insists that Afghanistan is "the central front" for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country's strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world's largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama's antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.

Facts like this should form the basis for a major adjustment in John McCain's presidential campaign.

The Arizona Senator needs to make a national address on victory in Iraq. McCain's mission is to hammer the point that Obama's been consistently wrong on Iraq and the surge, and that Obama's proposals for the future direction of the war are out of touch with military and strategic realities on the ground.

More importantly, as Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru argue, McCain needs to go on the attack across the board - he needs to pull a Hillary Clinton, with 3am campaign spots, beer and chasers with the working class, topped off the Maverick-style GOP talking points on promising public policy solutions to the electoral angst of American people.

Photo Credit: "Obama Survives Iraq, Looks Ahead," Time

Barack Obama at the West Bank

Via Little Green Footballs, here's Palestinian artist Walid Ayyub completing a portrait of Barack Obama in Ramallah, West Bank:

As Barack Obama prepares to visit the city of Ramallah in the West Bank, a Palestinian artist sketches Obama among his other portraits of Jesus, “martyred” Hamas terrorist Abdel Aziz Rantisi (“The Pediatrician of Death”), and Che Guevara.

With a peace dove, of course. You couldn’t make this up.

See also, "Obama Reaps Whirlwind of Positive Coverage In Iraq."

Photo Credit: Getty Images

President-Elect Obama Tours Europe

The National Review offers a penetrating editorial of Barack Obama's appeal in Europe:

When Barack Obama arrives in Europe this week, the senator will be greeted as a president-elect. His election in November is regarded as a mere formality — and in Europe it would be one. Obama’s margin of victory over John McCain in opinion polls is 51 percent in France, 49 percent in Germany, and 30 percent in Britain. What some skeptical European governments call “Obamania” is sweeping the continent.

Two factors largely explain this opinion tsunami: race and George W. Bush.

Taking their cue from America’s Obamaniacs, Europeans see the Illinois senator as a healer bringing absolution for the Republic’s original sin of racism. He shall overcome. But that blinding confidence is as far as the argument goes. How Obama will overcome is largely left unstated. Obama’s election, achieved in part by white votes, would itself mark a defeat for what remains of anti-black racism. But once an attempt is made to take the argument further, doubts set in.

If Obama follows the sort of race-conscious policies he has faithfully supported for the last quarter century — racial preferences and set-asides, now made more burdensome and complex by immigration — then racial divisions will continue and perhaps sharpen. If he is true to the “post-racial” rhetoric of his campaign, however, and seeks healing indirectly by helping the poor lift themselves out of poverty, then he would have better chances of long-term success. Short-term, though, he would invite noisy denunciations of betrayal from the Jacksons and Sharptons of this world.

In either event, healing would be postponed — and after a while, the failure of America to recreate itself as a post-racial utopia of universal goodwill would be held up as evidence of an unshakable racism. Disappointment on two continents is inherent in the current enthusiasm.

George W. Bush presents Obama with an even more tangled problem. Europeans regard Bush, his America, and his foreign policy as little short of diabolical. They see Obama as the Fifth Cavalry riding in to save them from such dangerous folly. But while they were demonstrating against “Bushitler,” his foreign policy changed sharply on a range of issues — North Korea, Iran, European defense — in a “European” direction. Since the primaries ended and the Iraq surge succeeded, moreover, Obama has hedged his position on Iraq withdrawal (among other things). And Sen. McCain was already closer than President Bush to the European allies on most foreign-policy issues, including climate change.

So, as European governments (but not European peoples) see it, Obama differs only modestly with both McCain and Bush on the foreign-policy matters about which they care most. What distinguishes him is his lack of experience.

Obama is uneasily aware of this. He is also usually too shrewd to flatter European prejudices at the cost (paid by Sen. John Kerry) of seeming either anti-American or nationally ambivalent. He is likely therefore to play it safe in three ways. To the Europeans he will offer a strong and eloquent defense of the Atlantic alliance. To the Americans watching on television, he will stress that Europe must play a stronger part in NATO and in such alliance ventures as Afghanistan both by contributing more troops and resources and by actually fighting the enemy. And to both sides, he will avoid taking on contentious issues: Would he stand up to the Russians, for instance, and install missile defenses in central Europe?

There's more at the link.

For a more wonkish example of Obama's likely vision of Europe, see Jamie Rubin, "Building a New Atlantic Alliance: Restoring America's Partnership With Europe."

For a sample of the nihilist "Bushitler" European base, see Battle Angel, "How Do I Get These Stains Out?"

Progressivism Goes Mainstream?

Sometimes I ask myself "why"?

Why worry about the likes of Markos Moulitsas and the angry hordes of the hard-left blogosphere? These folks can't genuinely threaten traditional decency and order. They're nothing more than an extreme fringe, unnoticed by the great silent majority of Americans, to be tolerated, even indulged once in a while, right?

I'd say yes, but for the life of me Kos and others like him get a lot of attention, and their bullying totalitarianism gets results.

It turns out that the Austin American-Statesman has repudiated and removed from its website a front-page story on last week's Netroots Nation convention at the insistence of Daily Kos.

An article, critical of the netroots radicals, was written by Patrick Beach, a "featured writer" at the paper. In turn, Greg Mitchell, at Daily Kos, attacked Beach as writing an "opinion" piece instead of hard news:

The new newspaper trend - even extending to boring old AP - of encouraging reporters to not merely report but opine in their "news" pieces reared its ugly head again this morning by way of a front page story in the Austin American-Statesman on Saturday's Netroots Nation events.

Patrick Beach, a feature writer at the paper who once described himself as a "raging moderate," repeatedly described the gathering in stereotypes that better fit the aging Old Left of years ago than the much younger Netroots of today. I mean, how many of you have ever read much of Chomsky...?

What was Beach's sin? Hitting a little too close to home, I'd say. Here's a sample:

Name-dropping Al Gore and his call for a switch to clean, renewable energy within 10 years was enough to pull whoops of approval from the 2,000 or 3,000 marauding liberals gathered for Netroots Nation at the Austin Convention Center on Saturday morning.

So when the former vice president and Nobel Prize co-winner made a surprise — and cleverly scripted — appearance during U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's talk, it looked like the conference might turn into a faint-in.

Talk that Pelosi (who is arguably so left-leaning that her parenthetical should be D-Beijing) would have a Very Special Guest had been buzzing about the conference of liberal bloggers, pols and media types since it began Thursday (it concludes today). But it wasn't clear to attendees that something was afoot until a schedule change handed out Saturday morning indicated the speaker's talk would last 45 minutes longer than previously indicated.

Not that Gore's appearance was necessary to whip up the troops.

From the beginning, it was clear these people were convinced the electoral map would be repainted with a brush sopping with blue paint come November.

Perhaps the piece is a bit satirical, but it's not unlike what's published routinely on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, which includes an offbeat news story at the bottom of column three every morning, or the Los Angeles Times, which features "Column One" daily, with many of the feature stories comprising fun-loving takes on the quirks of life.

No matter ... the newspaper caved:

Readers expect front-page stories to speak directly and clearly about events and issues. Eliminating the possibility of misunderstanding from our work is a critical part of our daily newsroom routine. When we communicate in a way that could be misinterpreted, we fail to meet our standards.

Our front-page story Sunday about the Netroots Nation convention included doses of irony and exaggeration. It made assertions (that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might find herself at home politically in Beijing, for example) and characterizations ("marauding liberals" was one) meant to amuse. For many readers, we failed.

In trying for a humorous take on the Netroots phenomenon without labeling it something other than a straightforward news story, we compromised our standards.

I guess that's it then. No more room for irony in serious journalism. I somehow doubt Jonathan Swift would be amused.

But there's more: Katherine Seelye reports that Markos Moulitsas - again - has announced that his progressive movement's the new mainstream:

Back in the early 1990s, with the rise of talk radio, conservative commentators derisively dubbed newspapers, magazines and broadcast television as the “mainstream media.” More recently, with the run-up to the Iraq war, liberal bloggers joined in, abbreviating the term to MSM.

But now the Internet has overtaken most newspapers and broadcasts as a source of news, and some on the left say the lingo ought to reflect that.

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the DailyKos Web site, the biggest liberal hub online, wrote on Monday that the heretofore “mainstream media” should be called the “traditional media.” Calling it mainstream implies that the Internet is fringe, he said, when in fact liberal bloggers, at least, are “representatives of the mainstream, and the country is embracing what we’re selling.”

Seelye notes, thankfully, that Moulitsas' megalomania hasn't gone unnoticed:

As you might imagine, not everyone agrees that Kos now represents the mainstream, and some have been mocking him (“If Moulitsas’s netroots were truly the mainstream, why would they attack a MODERATE Democrat who rarely strayed from the party line?” one asked, in reference to his debate Friday with Harold Ford, chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.)

That's fine, although leftist hopes are indeed high that the long-awaited proletarian revolution's coming in November.

Ezra Klein, a prominent left-wing writer in attendence at Netroots Nation, asked of the event's political significance, "Is Social Democracy A-Coming?"

It turns out that Klein's vision of this coming millenarian social democracy includes the elimination of meat from the diet. That's right: Meat's the new Marlboro, a socially incorrect health hazard that should be phased out of American diets to save the environment (meat production leaves a larger "carbon footprint").

This is the kind of progressivism that the netroots hordes want to ram down Americans' throats. But let's be honest: While perhaps the netroots hordes aren't up on Chomsky, they're certainly right at home with the kind of drastic change called for by '60-era ideology.

Indeed, Moulitsas has a new book forthcoming that offers a manifesto for today's netroots progressivism, Taking On the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era. Here's the product description:

The Sixties are over and the rules of power have been transformed. In order to change the world one needs to know how to manipulate the media, not just march in the streets. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, otherwise known as "Kos," is today's symbol of digital activism, giving a voice to everyday people. In "Taking on the System," Kos has taken a cue from his revolutionary predecessor's doctrine, Saul Alinksy's Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, and places this epic hand-book in today's digital era, empowering every American to make a difference in the 21st century.

There's some sheer hypocrisy - if not irony - inherent in this blurb.

Markos Moulitsas, who proclaims himself a digital revolutionary in his new book, sponsors attacks on news coverage of the very radicalism of his own movement - with the desired result achieved in the capitulation of the Austin American-Statesman to the left's totalitarian thought police.

But lest readers forget: Daily Kos is the blogosphere's top portal for the left's secular demonology of hate. Not only are moderate Democratic Party officials savagely attacked, the most extreme racist, anti-Semitic essays are published regularly on the blog.

Moulitsas himself is not above attacking John McCain for his teeth. As I've noted before:

The Kos page still hosts the rabidly anti-Semitic entry, "Eulogy before the Inevitability of Self-Destruction: The Decline and Death of Israel."

Kos himself recently attacked John McCain's physical appearance, ridiculing the Arizona Senator in a post entitled "McCain's Teeth."The "teeth" post is particularly egregious, considering that the McCain's teeth were broken off at the gumline by his North Vietnamese captors in 1968.

I think people really need to step back and think about this.

Kristin Power argued recently that the Kos kids hardly represent mainstream Democrat voters, people who are more concerned about paying their mortgage or securing health insurance than about FISA wiretaps.

And she's right, but incomplete. Moulitsas is onto something when he makes the case that the revolution's gone online, at least in the sense that the radical left bloggers are the "squeaky wheel" of the current Democratic Party policy base. Sure leftists lost on the FISA domestic surveillance bill, but look at the left's gleeful triumphalism this week on Barack Obama's world tour.

An Obama administration will restore 1930s-era pacifism as "mainstream" American foreign policy. Obama has said he'd consider war crimes trials for Bush administration officials - a main quiver in the leftosphere's Jacobin agenda - upon taking power. Obama's proposed dismantling America's nuclear arsenal. He reportedly had no problem with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a Palestian terrorist cell, providing security for his visit to Ramallah on the West Bank. And he's on board the radical global warming agenda, pushed by the Al Gore-faction of the Democratic Party left.

And that's just a sample in foreign policy! Domestically, from affirmative action to taxes, Barack Obama's a radical's dream.

So, while folks can quibble on whether or not Moulitsas represents the mainstream, the big picture suggests that should Obama be elected to office, he'll be pulled even further left than he already is. Call it a realignment or a revolution, but it's a direction in which many traditional Americans would not rather not go.

Postmodern Truth on Obama and Iraq

Michael Goldfarb, the Deputy Communications Director for John McCain's presidential campaign, makes a very concise argument on Barack Obama's consistent demands for withdrawal from Iraq, regardless of circumstances on the ground:

The reduction in violence, political reconciliation, the decimation of al Qaeda in Iraq, and the freedom of the Iraqi people--these are the fruits of the surge strategy that Barack Obama opposed and that John McCain advocated. The American people want their troops to come home, but the premise of this campaign is that they want the troops to come home with honor, having won the victory they've earned, and having left behind a stable and democratic Iraq that will be an ally in the war against radical Islamic extremism.

While Barack Obama promises to bring the troops home within 16 months, an unconditional timeline we reject not only as being dangerous but infeasible, John McCain promises to bring the troops home with victory secured. If there is a "growing consensus" to withdraw American troops, that consensus only exists because the American people now recognize that victory is at hand and our presence will not be required in Iraq for much longer. But Barack Obama has always supported withdrawing troops, regardless of the consequences for Iraq, the region, and American national security. At some point, we will be 16 months away from leaving Iraq, and then Obama will be claiming he was right all along. But even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Barack Obama's been wrong on Iraq from the beginning.

What's amazing, though, is how the postmodernists' version of the truth can now be pushed as the reality on Iraq, that, for example, both John McCain and President Bush have now "adopted" Obama's Iraq policy.

We've got a freaky, postmodern, post-MSM news spin, which is working very hard to elect our first postmodern president.

See also, for further effect, "Boost for Obama Over Iraq Withdrawal."

**********

UPDATE: There's still hope in the world! See, Allahpundit, "Obama: If I Had it to Do Over Again, I’d Still Oppose the Surge; Update: 'Clearly There’s Been an Enormous Improvement'."

Soak the Rich?

The Wall Street Journal reports on newly-released 2006 data showing windfall tax receipts from top income-earners, especially from the top 1:

Washington is teeing up "the rich" for a big tax hike next year, as a way to make them "pay their fair share." Well, the latest IRS data have arrived on who paid what share of income taxes in 2006, and it's going to be hard for the rich to pay any more than they already do. The data show that the 2003 Bush tax cuts caused what may be the biggest increase in tax payments by the rich in American history.

The nearby chart shows that the top 1% of taxpayers, those who earn above $388,806, paid 40% of all income taxes in 2006, the highest share in at least 40 years. The top 10% in income, those earning more than $108,904, paid 71%. Barack Obama says he's going to cut taxes for those at the bottom, but that's also going to be a challenge because Americans with an income below the median paid a record low 2.9% of all income taxes, while the top 50% paid 97.1%. Perhaps he thinks half the country should pay all the taxes to support the other half.

Aha, we are told: The rich paid more taxes because they made a greater share of the money. That is true. The top 1% earned 22% of all reported income. But they also paid a share of taxes not far from double their share of income. In other words, the tax code is already steeply progressive.

We also know from income mobility data that a very large percentage in the top 1% are "new rich," not inheritors of fortunes. There is rapid turnover in the ranks of the highest income earners, so much so that people who started in the top 1% of income in the 1980s and 1990s suffered the largest declines in earnings of any income group over the subsequent decade, according to Treasury Department studies of actual tax returns. It's hard to stay king of the hill in America for long.

The most amazing part of this story is the leap in the number of Americans who declared adjusted gross income of more than $1 million from 2003 to 2006. The ranks of U.S. millionaires nearly doubled to 354,000 from 181,000 in a mere three years after the tax cuts.

The Journal editors argue that these data show the dynamism of the economy amid lower tax rates, and they suggest that the increasing shifts in the ranks of high income earners is predicted by supply-side economic theory.

There's more at the link.

See also, "Dems Favor Economic Redistribution by 2 to 1 Over Republicans."

Obama Finance Director is Failed Subprime Banker

There's some dabate this morning as to whether the media's not just in the tank for Barack Obama, but whether there's a vast left-wing conspiracy to put the Illinois Senator in the White House.

Rasmussen, for example, reports that 49 percent of voters believe that media outlets are trying to help Obama with their coverage, up from 44 percent a month ago. What's more, CBS News asks, "Is Obama Getting Too Much Coverage?" And it's not just that: The New York Times has apparently rejected John McCain op-ed rebuttal to Obama's "Plan for Iraq" from last week.

On a related note, there's some left-wing agitation of late surrounding Randy Scheunemann, a top-foreign policy advisor to McCain. According to Lindsay Beyerstein:

John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser is a close business associate of Stephen Payne, the lobbyist caught on tape offering access to top administration officials in exchange for donations to the Bush Library.

This is explosive news because Payne's company's entire business model is international influence peddling in exchange for oil and gas leases from politically unstable and dictatorial regimes.

Presumably, Beyerstein's looking to expand Congress' Stephen Payne/Worldwide Strategic Partners cash-for-access probe of the Bush administration to the McCain campaign. As Beyerstein notes, emphatically:

Scheunemann, is listed as a member of Worldwide Strategic Energy's executive team...

Interesting, neither Beyerstein nor other contingents in the leftosphere are chumming the scandal waters this morning over the Wall Street Journal's report that Penny Pritzker, the national campaign finance chair of the Obama presidential campaign, is a former director of Superior Bank, an Illinois subprime institution half-owned by the Pritzker family. The bank's collapse resulted in the loss of savings for 1,400 depositors, and the institution was subject to a FDIC reorganization plan costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars:

For the Pritzker family of Chicago, the 2001 collapse of subprime-mortgage lender Superior Bank was an embarrassing failure in a corner of their giant business empire.

Billionaire Penny Pritzker helped run Hinsdale, Ill.-based Superior, overseeing her family's 50% ownership stake. She now serves as Barack Obama's national campaign-finance chairwoman, which means her banking past could prove to be an embarrassment to her - and perhaps to the campaign.

Superior was seized in 2001 and later closed by federal regulators. Government investigators and consumer advocates have contended that Superior engaged in unsound financial activities and predatory lending practices. Ms. Pritzker, a longtime friend and supporter of Sen. Obama, served for a time as Superior's chairman, and later sat on the board of its holding company.
Sen. Obama has long criticized predatory subprime mortgage lenders and urged strong actions against them.

In a prepared statement, the Obama campaign noted that Ms. Pritzker was never accused of wrongdoing by regulators in connection with Superior, and that her family agreed to pay $460 million to help defray the costs of Superior's collapse.

In a written response to questions, Ms. Pritzker said the reasons for Superior's fall "were complex. They include changes in accounting practices, auditing failures, reversals in regulatory positions and general economic conditions." During her tenure at the thrift, she said, she believed it followed "ethical business practices" and complied with "fair lending laws." For years, she said, Superior's financial statements were found to be acceptable by regulators.

The Obama campaign recently faced a controversy related to mortgage lending. A member of Sen. Obama's vice-presidential selection committee resigned after a Wall Street Journal story said he received favorable treatment on personal loans from Countrywide Financial Corp., a major subprime lender.

Ms. Pritzker's connection to Superior dates to the late 1980s, when the late Jay Pritzker, her uncle and then the family patriarch, moved to buy from federal regulators a troubled Illinois savings and loan. Ms. Pritzker, who has law and business degrees from Stanford, was to be the venture's chairman, said Mr. Pritzker's partner on the deal, New York real-estate developer Alvin Dworman, in a December 2006 deposition. "Jay bought the bank for her," he said in the deposition, taken in connection with litigation in Illinois state court related to the collapse. Mr. Dworman declined a recent interview request. Ms. Pritzker, in her statement, said she never heard her uncle mention her as a reason for the purchase.

Ms. Pritzker served as Superior chairman until 1994. During that period, Superior "embarked on a business strategy of significant growth into subprime home mortgages," which were then packaged into securities and sold to investors, according to a 2002 report by the Treasury Department's Inspector General.

"Superior was at the forefront of the securitizing of subprime mortgages," says Timothy Anderson, a retired bank consultant who has studied Superior and other failed thrifts.

If we use the same logic that Beyestein employs to suggest "explosive" implications for Scheunemann ties to Worldwide Strategic Energy, we should see similar outrage regarding Ms. Pritzker's background as subprime banking predator.

It is highly contradictory that Barack Obama employs a subprime lending boss as his finance director, when his own campaign platform on the economy pledges to "crack down on fraudulent brokers and lenders."

Recall that Barack Obama has a catastrophic record of failure in housing policy as an Illinois state legislator. He's also a machine politician, and in the case of Penny Pritzker, it appears that Obama finds no conflict of interest in favoring billionaire banking magnates who are on record as bilking small-time investors of their personal nest eggs.

More change we can believe in?