Iraq Hearings: The Iraqis Stepped Up to the Plate

We can expect big political fireworks on Capitol Hill this week, as General David Petraeus prepared to testify on progress in Iraq.

The political stakes of the hearings have been raised by the recent fighting in Basra, which the Democrats and the antiwar backers will protray as proof the surge has failed (Senator Joe Biden made that case over the weekend).

But the overall picture on the eve of the testimony is that Iraq has achieved a crucial turning point, that Iraq's indigenous forces have indeed "stood up," which is what antiwar hawks have been demanding for the past few years.

The Washington Post has some background on the political stakes this week in the Iraq debate:

When Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker travel to Capitol Hill tomorrow, they might be the ones before the microphones, but the cameras will be trained on three of their inquisitors: Sens. John McCain, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The hearings before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees promise to be as much about presidential politics as about the past six months of military and diplomatic progress in Iraq. All last summer, Washington anxiously awaited the September appearances of Petraeus, the commanding U.S. general in Iraq, and Crocker, the top U.S. diplomat in Baghdad, anticipating that their testimony could determine the political viability of continued war.

Their return engagement is eliciting no more than shrugs -- except on the political front. It has been months since Obama, McCain or Clinton appeared at a hearing, but all three contenders for the White House will take rare breaks from their campaigns to be on hand. Although the committee chairmen are loath to admit it, two relatively junior Democratic senators and one ranking Republican are likely to steal the show.

"This is sort of a dress rehearsal for who is best prepared to be commander in chief, who has the best understanding of what has happened, what was wrong in Iraq and how to fix it," noted Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), an Armed Services Committee member and McCain backer.

For the three candidates -- and for the Senate at large -- there is little expectation of surprises. Last September, lawmakers anxiously watched for cracks, either in Republican support of President Bush's war policies or in Democratic opposition.

"It's all completely predictable this time, what everyone is going to say," said Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), a senior Foreign Relations Committee member and Obama backer.

If anything, the campaigns have dug the divisions deeper. Besides Bush, no other politician is as vested in the success of the troop increase and new counterinsurgency strategy as is McCain. He helped promote the troop increase, then used the fall and winter's drop in violence to resurrect his campaign. Graham said McCain has the opportunity tomorrow to make those successes his own -- and to challenge his would-be Democratic rivals to prove them illusory.

The Washington Post story suggests that recent figting in Iraq has been "inconclusive." But as Ralph Peters, a retired United States Army Lieutenant Colonel, and columnist at the New York Post, observes:

I watched the Basra dust-up from Panama, amazed at the willful obtuseness of "war correspondents" who still refuse to acknowledge basic military realities. They demanded a level of effectiveness from Iraqi troops that the British had been unable (and unwilling) to deliver over the last five years.

Unlike the Brits, who faked it, the Iraqis went into the city and fought. Was their performance perfect? Of course not. But this is where the punditry got really interesting.

Many of the critics had previously lavished praise on the counterinsurgency manual that Petraeus midwifed. One of the most-quoted maxims from that document was T.E. Lawrence's admonition that it's better for our local allies to do something imperfectly themselves than for us to do it perfectly for them.

Well, the Iraqis stepped up to the plate. A few units folded. Others fought ferociously. They did what we said we wanted - and the critics raised the bar again. (Unfair criteria for success now may pose a greater obstacle in Iraq and Afghanistan than do al Qaeda or the Taliban.)

And, by the way, it was Moqtada al Sadr, not the Iraqi government, who requested a cease-fire - after being urged by the Iranians to opt to let those militias live to fight another day.

Partisan critics refuse to accept that war is tough and results are never perfect. They want it all wrapped up neatly at the end of the two-hour movie so we can all walk out of the theater feeling good.

See also my earlier posts, "Postwar Germany: Messy Precedent for Iraq," and "The Basra Model."

Photo Credit: Middle East Online

Postwar Germany: Messy Precedent for Iraq

Lots of war opponents say Iraq and World War II are incomparable, that we can't use the American occupations of Germany and Japan as models for what may happen today in the Middle East.

Such arguments, often used to denounce claims of a long-term presence in Iraq in the years ahead, conveniently make the post-WWII occupations look like a Sunday walk in the park, without, for example, the sectarian violence or the American military and poltical incompetence alleged to have doomed the Iraq mission from the start.

This is, of course, selective, self-serving history, as David Stafford shows at the Washington Post:

Smash the enemy, deliver victory, topple the dictator, destroy his regime, eliminate his evil ideology, and establish peace and democracy. Oh, and -- almost forgot -- do this several thousand miles away on a distant continent while also fighting another life-or-death struggle elsewhere. Meanwhile, make sure to keep in step with our allies. And one last thing: Bring the troops back home as soon as possible.

Mission impossible? Entering year six of the Iraq war, with 4,000 Americans dead in the conflict, the president's popularity hitting new lows and results of the troop surge still fragile, it may look that way for the administration of George W. Bush. But we may also be rushing to judgment.

More than 60 years ago, during World War II, Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower didn't think that his similar, even more daunting, mission was impossible. By the time he had completed his crusade in Europe and thanked his staff for a job well done at a farewell ceremony in Frankfurt in July 1945, the German army, or Wehrmacht, no longer existed, Hitler was dead, the Nazi Party had been dissolved, war criminals were behind bars awaiting trial and retribution, de-Nazification had begun, and western Germany -- the part not occupied by the Soviet army -- was on its way to becoming one of the most successful liberal democracies of the Western world. The Third Reich was history.

So what did the United States do right 60 years ago that it has -- so far -- failed to accomplish in Iraq since the iconic toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad and Bush's "Mission Accomplished" declaration aboard a U.S. carrier on May 1, 2003?

The question is, of course, superficial. It would be harder to think of two more different societies than Germany in 1945 and contemporary Iraq. The former -- despite Hitler and the Third Reich -- had a long tradition of law, order, constitutional government and civic society to draw on in rebuilding democracy. Nor was it riven by deep-rooted ethnic and sectarian religious tensions that erupted to the surface once the dictator's iron fist was removed. And although Germany certainly had hostile neighbors -- especially to the communist East -- the threat they posed served to create, not crack, political cohesion.

Yet in looking at Iraq over the past five years, it's hard not to find poignant echoes of the post-WWII experience and to wonder whether a better knowledge of that history might have helped prevent some basic errors. Or even -- because there may be some small crumb of comfort for optimists here -- that it's too soon to declare that the mission has failed. Sen. John McCain's 100-year horizon for a U.S. presence in Iraq may be stretching things. But let's not forget that the postwar occupation of Germany lasted for a full decade.

In 1945, the Allies had a carefully thought-out plan for what would follow victory. For two years before his forces crossed the German frontier, Eisenhower and his staff at Allied headquarters worked on detailed plans for the occupation. The lines of command were clearly drawn, and everyone agreed that the military would be in charge. Thousands of soldiers were trained in the tasks of military government. Compare that with the chaotically devised schemes for Iraq that were cobbled together at the last minute amid squabbling between the Pentagon and the State Department. Or with the confused and confusing mandate handed to the hapless Jay Garner, the first administrator of postwar Iraq, to devise a comprehensive plan for its administration in a matter of weeks.

Nonetheless, plans, however thorough, are worthless if they cannot be implemented. For that, establishing law and order is a minimal and basic condition. There was plenty of looting and disorder when U.S. forces entered Germany. In fact, it was on a scale far greater than anticipated or now remembered, most of it due to the rage that millions of slave laborers who'd been deported to Germany from Nazi-occupied countries, chiefly Poland and the Soviet Union, vented on their captors upon liberation.

As in Baghdad five years ago, the disorder also engulfed cultural institutions. When U.S. forces entered Munich, Hitler's spiritual home and the seat of Nazi Party headquarters, scores of works of art simply disappeared from museums and art galleries. For two or three days, the northern city of Bremen was "probably among the most debauched places on the face of God's earth," wrote one witness of the frantic looting that took place after Allied soldiers entered its bomb-shattered streets.

But this anarchy was quickly and forcefully stamped out, and enough Allied forces remained in the country and in all major cities to impose stringent and often ruthless order. Military tribunals promptly disposed of Nazis who were inclined to continue the struggle by executing them or imposing severe terms of imprisonment.

The way victory was declared was crucial. Immediately after entering Germany in September 1944, Eisenhower issued a proclamation that declared: "We come as conquerors, but not as oppressors." The emphasis on conquest meant that military government ruled. There was no glib talk of liberation, and no dealing, either, with the large number of anti-Nazi exiles who had jockeyed for recognition as some sort of government in exile. Too many of them were long out of touch with realities on the ground or had axes to grind.

Critics of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq point to the decisions by L. Paul Bremer, Garner's replacement, to dismiss Baathists from public office and to dissolve the Iraqi army as critical and disastrous turning points that created a vast legion of the unemployed and disaffected. Yet in 1945, the Allies implemented a similarly draconian policy in Germany. They dissolved the Nazi Party, carried out a thorough purge of Nazis in public office and even abolished the ancient state of Prussia, which they believed was at the root of German militarism. Millions of Wehrmacht soldiers languished in prisoner-of-war camps while their families struggled to survive.

None of this, however, had the catastrophic consequences seen in Iraq. One reason is that pragmatism almost immediately took hold. It quickly became clear that Germany could be rebuilt only with the help of numerous people who had been members of the Nazi Party.

The Allies entered Germany with a strict policy of "non-fraternization" that forbade their forces to have any but the most minimal and formal dealings with Germans. "Don't get chummy with Jerry," urged the G.I. newspaper Stars and Stripes. "In heart, body and spirit every German is a Hitler." But by July 1945, the policy had been abandoned as unenforceable. It was also alienating the very Germans needed to rebuild the country and establish democracy.

As for de-Nazification, it sounded good, and indeed was morally and politically necessary. But distinguishing between real and nominal Nazis often proved extremely difficult. Small officials who'd joined the party out of necessity were thrown out of office, while big businessmen who'd profited under Hitler were left alone. The policy generated growing hostility to the occupiers, and its implementation was soon handed over to the Germans themselves. This caused its own bitterness as the Germans were often seen as being too lenient.

Even so, despite this willingness to rethink and adjust, occupation policy floundered. Two years after Allied victory, Germany was in desperate straits, facing an economic crisis that threatened to nip democracy in the bud. Only the Marshall Plan, with its massive program of financial aid, saved the country from disaster. Self-government did not come until 1949, and Allied troops remained in West Germany as occupiers until 1955, a full decade after the defeat of the Third Reich. Unrepentant Nazis stayed active on the extreme fringes of West German politics for years, and a few ex-Nazis held high positions even in mainstream politics until the 1960s. The Christian Democratic politician Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933, was chancellor of the Federal Republic from 1966 to 1969.

Rebuilding a nation is possible. But even in the best of circumstances, it takes effort, time, patience and pragmatism. As 1945 confirms, liberation from a dictator in itself offers no easy path to peace or democracy. Battlefield victory is the easy bit. Building peace is a constant struggle -- and it's a matter of years, not weeks.

See also, Victor Davis Hanson, "Nothing Succeeds Like Success," at Commentary.

The Basra Model

Via Michael Yon:

The outcome of the Battle of Basra is still unclear. But as things stabilize in that critical city—the southern gateway to Iraq's oil wealth—Basra may well turn out to be Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Kasserine Pass.

Click Here to read the entire article written by Michael Hirsh in Newsweek.

Also, check Wikipedia's entry, "Battle of the Kasserine Pass."

Dueling Patriotisms

Are conservatives more patriotic than lefties?

It seems like the answer's straightforward: On the big issues of the day - which I see as the defense of traditional values (like national greatness) and questions of war and peace - conservatives win hands down.

Simply, it's just hard to call yourself a patriot when you're rooting for the other side.

Yet, there's an interesting little kerfuffle on the topic breaking out in the blogosphere, with Peter Wehner at Commentary taking on Joe Klein at Swampland.

Klein's clever, but he's badly outmatched by Wehner on this issue.

Here's Wehner's post:

In a rather stunning sentence that Ramesh Ponnuru flagged over at National Review’s The Corner, Joe Klein, in saying that the “chronic disease among Democrats” is their tendency to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right, wrote this:

This is ironic and weirdly self-defeating, since the liberal message of national improvement is profoundly more optimistic, and patriotic, than the innate conservative pessimism about the perfectibility of human nature.

As Ponnuru points out, can you imagine Klein’s outrage if the charge had been made the other way - that the conservative message of national improvement is more “patriotic” than liberalism?

Read the whole thing, but especially Wehner's knockout blow:

Beyond that, is Klein really prepared to argue that the aim of the institutional strongholds of contemporary liberalism - whether we are talking about the academy or Hollywood or others - is to deepen our love for America and increase our civic devotion and pride? That their efforts will make us a more perfect union? Does Klein believe that during the last several decades liberals rather than conservatives have been more likely to reject cultural relativism and radical multiculturalism? Have liberals rather than conservatives been more vocal in arguing why the United States is better in every way than its totalitarian enemies? Is Ted Kennedy really more patriotic in his “liberal message of national improvement” than Ronald Reagan was in his conservative message of national improvement?

To be sure, patriotism is a complicated matter, as it has many elements to it and tensions within it. It is certainly not the property of any one political party. It is not blind support for America, just as it is not reflexive opposition to America. But what we can say, I think, is that ... part of what it has traditionally meant to be an American is to believe in our most cherished creeds - most especially that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Patriotism also demands that we hold an honest view of our nation — which, in the case of America, means we should acknowledge our injustices (past and present) even as we acknowledge that, in Allan Bloom’s words, “America tells one story: the unbroken ineluctable progress of freedom and equality.” And of course patriotism requires us to sacrifice for our country, to defend her when she is under assault, and to do what we can to help America live up to her founding ideals.

I like how Wehner notes how patriotism's a complex thing.

Not only should it be "bipartisan property," it's a shame that it's not more so, especially now, when being patriotic for many on the left is spitting on the troops with endless portrayals about how military service-personnel have been "victimized" by the Bush's war policies. That's hardly patriotic, and that's just one example.

But here's Klein's most recent rejoinder to the debate:

Pete Wehner, former chief White House propagandist for the Iraq war, has taken me to task for claiming that liberalism is more optimistic and therefore inherently more patriotic than conservatism. That takes some nerve. He would compare my statement to the constant drumbeat of right-wingnutters questioning the patriotism of those who do not support the Bush Administration's foreign policy foolishness. But I didn't do that at all. I didn't question the patriotism of conservatives: I simply argued that it is more patriotic to be optimistic about the chance that our collective will--that is, the best work of government--will succeed, rather than that it will fail or impinge on freedom.

In others words, it is more patriotic to be in favor of civil rights legislation than to oppose it...to be in favor of social security and medicare than to oppose them...and to hope that the better angels of our legislators--acting in concert, in compromise--will produce a universal health insurance system and an alternative energy plan that we can all be proud of. Conservative skepticism has its place; it can be a valuable corrective when government goes flabby and corrupt or engages in wild neo-colonialist fantasies abroad.

If you read further, you'll see Klein backs off a bit from the private interest versus public purpose contrast.

But as he continues, he buries his own case for the left's patriotism by more vehemently condemning the Bush administration as an unmitigated disaster:

Those who have stood in the path of progress have been wrong far more often than they've been right. And those who spent the past seven years as propagandists for the one of the worst, and needlessly blood-soaked, presidencies in American history, have such a fabulous record of self-righteous wrong-headedness that they needn't be taken seriously at all.

Frankly, for all the problems of the Bush administration, it simply strains credibility to suggest conservative backers for President Bush and the Iraq war are servile "propagandists."

Klein's gone completely the other way: He suggests that it's unpatriotic to back the administration's forward policy of democracy promotion in Iraq. The historical record is actually more in line with the Bush's agenda - from McKinley to Roosevelt to Reagan - than Klein acknowledges.

So, who wins? Perhaps the notion of "bipartisan patriotism" isn't such a possiblity after all.

Photo Credit: New York Times

Charlton Heston, 1923-2008

Charlton Heston always seemed like a good man to me.

His movies weren't my favorite, although that was really more of a generational thing than anything else.

I saw him perfrom live in London in 1985, as Captain Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny."

I can watch "The Ten Commandments" again and again, and I think that's how I remember Heston the most.

In my younger, pre-neocon days, I simply didn't assess Heston politically.

Frankly, I wasn't even going to post an obituary until I read Matthew Yglesias' depraved comments on Heston's death:

His political trajectory was a little silly, but also in a very fitting way utterly typical of the larger trajectory of American history. His death, we hope, comes at a time when the great backlash of which he was a part is finally receding.

Yglesias concludes with "rest in peace."

I recall reading that when a conservative becomes ill or dies, leftists cheer. Yglesias isn't so disrespectful as he is distasteful. Perhaps he could have posted a picture, a link to an obituary, and then signed off with "rest in peace." No, he had to try and pull some larger meaning from Heston's passing, that perhaps burying Heston will presage the death of the conservatives he loathes so much.

I noticed not too many lefties commenting on Heston's death (as measured by links at Memeorandum).

Perhaps they've learned their lesson, that they want to avoid the total hypocrisy of their low-down attacks. As FrontPageMage notes:

For the left, civility is a one-way street, running toward them – but never in the opposite direction....

Their modus operandi is calling conservatives: racists, bigots, hate-mongers, warmongers, Nazis, trigger-happy cowboys, gun nuts, psychos, despoilers of the environment and political Ebenezer Scrooges rubbing their bony hands together in greedy glee as widows and orphans starve in the streets simply to boost the profits of their junk bonds.

Or, they simply hope that the death of a revered conservative American preceeds the passing of the movement to which they belong.

No class there, no class at all.

That's not surprising, of course. See my earlier post, "The Radical Foreign Policy of Matthew Yglesias."

See also Ann Althouse, "Charlton Heston, "remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo."

Photo Credit: "In 2003, Mr. Heston was a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Bush," New York Times

From Impeachment to War Crimes: The New Revenge Against BushCo

The radical left failed miserably in its half-decade campaign to impeach top officials in the Bush administration.

Bush-bashers haven't given up hopes of revenge, of course, and the latest controversy over the "torture memos" has given new impetus for legal action against members of the hated Bush/Cheney regime.

Crooks and Liars is positively ejaculatory over the suggestion by Andrew Sullivan that principals in the torture controversy should be tried as war criminals (via Memeorandum).

The left's dizzying rush of vengeful palpitations results not just from the Justice Department's release of the memos this week, but by the war crimes journalism of Phillippe Sands, who has a new full-length article on the administration's policy developments on coercive interrogations at Vanity Fair, "The Green Light." It's a long and technically detailed article, but the conclusion is red meat for radical left Bush-bashers seeking their tons of administration flesh:

Those responsible for the interrogation of Detainee 063 face a real risk of investigation if they set foot outside the United States. Article 4 of the torture convention criminalizes “complicity” or “participation” in torture, and the same principle governs violations of Common Article 3.

It would be wrong to consider the prospect of legal jeopardy unlikely. I remember sitting in the House of Lords during the landmark Pinochet case, back in 1999—in which a prosecutor was seeking the extradition to Spain of the former Chilean head of state for torture and other international crimes—and being told by one of his key advisers that they had never expected the torture convention to lead to the former president of Chile’s loss of legal immunity. In my efforts to get to the heart of this story, and its possible consequences, I visited a judge and a prosecutor in a major European city, and guided them through all the materials pertaining to the Guantánamo case. The judge and prosecutor were particularly struck by the immunity from prosecution provided by the Military Commissions Act. “That is very stupid,” said the prosecutor, explaining that it would make it much easier for investigators outside the United States to argue that possible war crimes would never be addressed by the justice system in the home country—one of the trip wires enabling foreign courts to intervene. For some of those involved in the Guantánamo decisions, prudence may well dictate a more cautious approach to international travel. And for some the future may hold a tap on the shoulder.

“It’s a matter of time,” the judge [interviewed for this story] observed. “These things take time.” As I gathered my papers, he looked up and said, “And then something unexpected happens, when one of these lawyers travels to the wrong place.”

Sands is a lawyer and professor of international law based in Britain (with a new book forthcoming, Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values). His reporting feeds the agenda of the global human rights movement, which has been building an international regime to enforce global justice in supranational courts of universal jurisdiction.

Actually, this latest controversy over the torture memos is part and parcel to the radical left's agenda of worldwide judicial tyranny, which is explained by Henry Kissinger at Foreign Affairs:

In less than a decade, an unprecedented movement has emerged to submit international politics to judicial procedures. It has spread with extraordinary speed and has not been subjected to systematic debate, partly because of the intimidating passion of its advocates. To be sure, human rights violations, war crimes, genocide, and torture have so disgraced the modern age and in such a variety of places that the effort to interpose legal norms to prevent or punish such outrages does credit to its advocates. The danger lies in pushing the effort to extremes that risk substituting the tyranny of judges for that of governments; historically, the dictatorship of the virtuous has often led to inquisitions and even witch-hunts.

The doctrine of universal jurisdiction asserts that some crimes are so heinous that their perpetrators should not escape justice by invoking doctrines of sovereign immunity or the sacrosanct nature of national frontiers. Two specific approaches to achieve this goal have emerged recently. The first seeks to apply the procedures of domestic criminal justice to violations of universal standards, some of which are embodied in United Nations conventions, by authorizing national prosecutors to bring offenders into their jurisdictions through extradition from third countries. The second approach is the International Criminal Court (ICC), the founding treaty for which was created by a conference in Rome in July 1998 and signed by 95 states, including most European countries....

THE IDEOLOGICAL supporters of universal jurisdiction also provide much of the intellectual compass for the emerging International Criminal Court. Their goal is to criminalize certain types of military and political actions and thereby bring about a more humane conduct of international relations....

The advocates of universal jurisdiction argue that the state is the basic cause of war and cannot be trusted to deliver justice. If law replaced politics, peace and justice would prevail. But even a cursory examination of history shows that there is no evidence to support such a theory. The role of the statesman is to choose the best option when seeking to advance peace and justice, realizing that there is frequently a tension between the two and that any reconciliation is likely to be partial. The choice, however, is not simply between universal and national jurisdictions.

The advocates Kissinger refers to are the leaders of such groups like After Downing Street and World Can't Wait.

These groups have vowed to "to send Bush, Cheney and the rest of those fascists packing."

This week's controversy over the torture memos, timed pefectly with Sands' legal manifesto, feeds the fires of radicals trying to do just that, with a war crimes tribunal the immediate destination.

Photo Credit: Vanity Fair

Iran Joined in Battle for Basra

The war in Iraq has taken a new turn with the fighting in Basra.

Like the during Cold War, where the Soviets challenged American world power by fighting proxy wars against U.S. allies on the periphery, Iran has escalated it strategic competition in the Middle East with the deployment of Iranian military personnel in the recent Shiite fighting in Iraq.

The Times of London has the story:

IRANIAN forces were involved in the recent battle for Basra, General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, is expected to tell Congress this week.

Military and intelligence sources believe Iranians were operating at a tactical command level with the Shi’ite militias fighting Iraqi security forces; some were directing operations on the ground, they think.

Petraeus intends to use the evidence of Iranian involvement to argue against any reductions in US forces.

Also, the Los Angeles Times reports that Petraeus may have some concern that the political alignments in Washington are turning against a sustained U.S. presence in Iraq.

On a related point, see also my earlier entry, "Basra Breakout: The Second Iran-Iraq War."

Left Smears McCain's Military Service as "Wrong Code" for Office

We already know the left's in full battle mode with its smears against John McCain as a "warmonger."

It should be no surprise, then, to see the beginning of a new delegitimization campaign against the Arizona Senator's service to country. McCain's family "honor" of military service is being attacked as "the wrong code for directing national policy":

The question is this: will America sacrifice herself to vindicate the personal sense of honor of one man? If there were no war, Senator McCain might be a good president. With the Iraq war going on, however, there is an overriding reason to vote against McCain in 2008 ... The reason to vote against McCain, paradoxically, is McCain's military experience. I'm not referring to his experience with military affairs, but the personal military experiences that shaped him....

The problem is that McCain doesn't see himself as a civilian. He was, is and will always be defined in his own mind by the code of military service. This would be a great quality in a general or perhaps in a peacetime president, but will be disastrous in wartime. There is a reason our founders wanted America's military to have dispassionate civilian leadership.

McCain thinks of himself in terms of honor, service and sacrifice. These laudable abstract spiritual ideas are a terrific quality in officers leading last stands or in medics attending the battlefield wounded. But honor, service and sacrifice are the wrong code for directing national policy....

McCain would bring both a historical perspective and psychological needs to the presidency. Simply put, McCain does not want to be the president that presides over today's Iraqi equivalent of the mass exit from the rooftop of Saigon's American embassy.

This is an extreme characterization of McCain's "psychological needs."

Throughout American history military service has been considered an asset for aspirants to the Oval Office. Recall that John F. Kennedy's call to "pay any price" for the survival of liberty gained more power and legitimacy by the fact that the 35th president was a highly-decorated World War II veteran of the Pacific war.

I see this delegitimization campaign as frankly of an extension of the radical left's hatred of the American military itself, with McCain now posited as the most visible and reviled symbol of that institution's place in American political history.

For an interesting, and not completed unrelated debate, see Ann Althouse, "McCain is "implicitly attacking Obama for basking in self-glory, when the Obama campaign is very much predicated on 'we' and not 'I.'"

Kos Ready for Clinton's "Declaration of Civil War"

Markos Moulitsas has a new essay up at Newsweek attacking Hillary Clinton for battling the Democratic nomination race to the bitter end:

Hillary Clinton has proved during the past few months that she is a fighter, that she is tenacious, and that she is in the race to win. There's just one problem. She's already lost.

No matter how you define victory, Barack Obama holds an insurmountable lead in the race to earn the Democratic nomination. He leads in the one metric that matters most: the pledged delegates chosen directly by Democratic voters. But he also leads in the popular vote,

the number of states won and money raised. Still, Obama's advantages aren't large enough to allow him an outright victory. He needs the 20 percent of party delegates who aren't bound to a candidate. It's with these superdelegates that Clinton has staked her ephemeral chances.

Clinton's near-lone chance of victory rests with a coup by superdelegate, persuading enough of them to overcome the primary voters' preference. Yet a coup by elite Democrats would be ill-received, to put it mildly. Obama's base spans the party's most loyal and engaged constituencies: African-Americans, professionals who generate hundreds of millions in small-dollar donations and a conventional-wisdom-defying outpouring of youth support.

If Obama lost at the polling booth, these supporters would accept the voters' verdict and carry on. Many, including those who backed Howard Dean's heartbreaking 2004 campaign, have been through such disappointment before. But if Beltway bigwigs steal a hard-won victory, it would amount to a declaration of civil war. Not only would the resolve of thousands of loyal foot soldiers and the party's new fund-raising base be irrevocably shaken, but it would torpedo the opportunity to build and strengthen a new generation of Democrats.

Clinton's best-case scenario for victory requires sundering her own party. It is an inherently divisive strategy, but she doesn't appear to care. For Clinton, all's fair in pursuit of victory—even destroying her party from within. Her campaign has adopted a bizarre "insult-40-states strategy," which has belittled states small, liberal and Red. Apparently, the only states that matter are the ones she coincidentally happens to win.

I'd just turn this around a bit.

Since Clinton can legitimately compete for the nomination under Demcratic Party rules, it's Kos himself who's announcing a rebellion.

And why not?

All along he's meglomanically declared that his blog's movement is the real heart and soul of the Democratic Party, and the Kos radicals are in the tank for Obama.

If Hillary takes it all the way to the convention, would it be out of hand to think of Daily Kos' suborning violent protests in the streets in August?

Denver, Colorado ... the Ft. Sumter of 2008?

Racial Resentment with Wright's Sermons: The Polite Label for White Racism?

Barack Obama really did have a transcendental racial appeal, but it was way back in 2004, at the time of the Democratic National Convention, when he was a relative unknown.

He could afford, then, to enunciate a true vision of racial equality that called forth both social reform and personal responsibility. Indeed, Obama could fire up the Democratic Party base by taking it to "de man" while simultaneously assuaging the powerful white racial guilt honed by decades of black racial victimology.

When does it all end?

Not soon, if this weekend's racial hornet's nest surrounding the 40-year commemoration of Martin Luther King's assassination is any indication.

I'm frankly still amazed at the commentary I read advancing the unmitigated racist society meme common among black intellectuals.

A prime example is this comment from Michael Dawson following Obama's Philadelphia speech on race and religion following the backlash against Reverend Wright's black liberation America-bashing (via Jacob Levy):

I'm worried it was it too little, too late.

It was too little in that while addressing race it equated white racial resentment (which scholars know is really just a more polite label for white racism) with the black anger and skepticism that comes out of past and current racial discrimination.

I suspect blacks will give Obama a break on this score, but those comments will not satisfy those large segments of white America that harbor racial resentment. It was too little when he argued that we can move forward toward racial justice for all without the "need to recite…the history of racial injustice."

It was too little because even though he strongly and correctly argued that today's racial disadvantage is based on the white supremacy of the past, we know that many, many whites do not connect the black situation today to either the injustices of the past or the present.

The history must be retold if a case is to be made to explain black disadvantage in this period. It was unfortunate when he implied that blacks were not willing to come together in multi-racial coalitions now or in the past. In the great populist and labor multi-racial coalitions of the late 19th century and early 20th century, during the Civil Rights era, and in modern times it was whites liberals and progressives that walked away from those coalitions with the predictable result of sparking much greater support for black nationalist movements such as those of Marcus Garvey, the Black Power movement, and Min. Louis Farrakhan.

Dawson's one of the top political scientists working on politics and race, which is one of the reasons I find his views unproductive.

Recent polls indicate huge majorities favorable toward an African-American presidential candidate this year. For example, in February 2007, just 6 percent said they'd be "less likely" to support a black candidate for the presidency in 2008. In addition, one of the big election stories this year in the Democratic primaries was the collapse of the "Bradley thesis." Why didn't voters go for Barack Obama after his powerful surge in Iowa? Racial "resentment? It's more likely that a women's "sympathy vote" helped Hillary Clinton come back after her poor showing in the Hawkeye State.

Dawson's at the Univeristy of Chicago, but he's formally of Harvard, having left there after University President Larry Summers was pilloried for suggesting innate gender differences in research productivity in the hard sciences. One doesn't want want to be associated with that type of intolerant scholarly environment, no siree. Not only that, there's a racial grievance project behind such resentment (or, in Ruth Wisse's words, an accusation of bias like this, "advanced by feminists and often accepted at face value by the academic community, attempts to transform guarantees of equal opportunity into a demand for equal outcome").

But hey, people don't want to talk about that.

I wonder if it ever occurs to folks like Dawson that white Americans just don't care to hear such black theological truths, such as, "Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run." Perhaps they might prefer their sermons without such fanatical chants as, "America is still the No. 1 killer in the world ... We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."

No, I imagine folks are in no mind to carry much truck with such racial animosity. Who needs it, especially decades after America's historic commiment to racial equality has produced a vigorous African-American middle class, black executives and scholars like Dawson and Michael Eric Dyson, all part and parcel to the statistical evidence of the dramatic progress African-Americans have made since then?

See also my earlier post, "Will the Real MLK Please Stand Up?," as well as some of the other related commentary at Memeorandum.

McCain Attacked as "Warmonger" at Obama Rally

This Caucus story makes it look like Ed Schultz's slur of John McCain as a "warmonger" is exceptional, out-of-the-blue, in fact.

But, frankly, mainstream Democratic Party supporters are essentially indistinguishable from the party's hardline radical base, particularly those found in the antiwar netroots.

Here's the background:

On the air, Ed Schultz, a liberal talk show host based in Fargo, N.D., is well-known for his blunt criticisms of the Bush Administration and the Republican Party. But Mr. Schultz, a fervent supporter of Senator Barack Obama, may have gone too far late Friday when he called Senator John McCain “a warmonger.”

Mr. Schultz, whose program is syndicated nationally, made the remarks while revving up a group of Obama supporters at a $100-a-head fund raiser at the North Dakota Democratic Party’s convention in Grand Forks. As soon as the Republican National Committee got word of the attack, it issued a statement lambasting Mr. Schultz and calling on Mr. Obama to repudiate the characterization of the presumptive Republican nominee for President.

It's obviously difficult to corral potentially inflammatory rhetoric coming from fired up supporters, but such talk should certainly not be unexpected, given the implacable hostility to the administration's war among those on the antiwar left:

As his position as the Democratic front-runner solidifies, Mr. Obama has stepped up his attacks on Mr. McCain’s views and policies. But he frequently prefaces and tempers those criticisms, as he did Friday in Indiana and North Dakota and Saturday in Montana, by calling Mr. McCain “a genuine war hero who deserves our respect” and making clear that the differences between the two men are political, not personal.

The Republican primary was “nothing more than a contest to see who was best qualified to run for George Bush’s third term,” Mr. Obama said in a speech to the North Dakota Democrats on Friday evening. “John McCain won that contest, and now he’s offering four more years of the very same policies that failed us for the last eight.”

“We can’t afford to give John McCain the chance to carry on George Bush’s can’t-do, won’t-do, won’t-even-try style of politics,” he also said. “We are a better country than that.”

A better country than what?

One that will fight - with very few allies, if necessary - to uphold the pinciples of international law embodied in the U.N. Charter, as well as the specific resolutions on Iraqi violations of the world body's disarmement regime.

Is there a better country? I don't think so.

See more commentary at Memeorandum.

The Radical Foreign Policy of Matthew Yglesias

In my earlier post, "Blogging Foreign Policy: Bereft of Credentials, Left Strains to Shift Debate," I argued that the left blogosphere hosts a number of hardcore antiwar bloggers straining to influence the debate on American foreign policy. Their shared agenda is hatred of the Bush administration's anti-insurgency war in Iraq, as well as opposition to a firm U.S. stand in other assorted flashpoints, like the U.S.-Iran nuclear weapons showdown.

I include Spencer Ackerman, Glenn Greenwald, Josh Marshall, Cernig Newshog, and Matthew Yglesias in the bunch. I've got posts taking down the first four (here, here, here, and here), although I've yet to really trounce Yglesias.

It turns out that Yglesias, a perversely popular left-wing blogger, has a new book out, Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats.

I'm planning on reading it - not because of any burning desire, but simply from the need to "know your enemy."

I'm sure I'll have a post or two on the book at some point, but in the meanwhile check out Jamie Kirchick's killer review over at City Journal. Kirchick provides the basic background to Yglesias' thesis, particularly the book's attack on left-of-center "liberal war hawks, " who are reviled by the antiwar set as much as the Bush necons themselves.

But Kirchick's substantive review is devastating. Not only does the book misrepresent the record of liberal internationalism (a dominant strain in U.S. foreign policy since WWII), the positions Yglesias advocates - despite his protestations - come off as commensurate to the international program of the anti-American left:

Heads in the Sand is but the latest in a barrage of books condemning the foreign policy of George W. Bush. Where Yglesias tries to distinguish himself is by attacking a class to which he once belonged, however briefly: Democratic politicians and left-of-center commentators who supported the Iraq War. Many of these “liberal hawks” have since recanted in the face of the war’s bloody aftermath. Others have claimed that it was not the war itself that was mistaken but its execution, a qualification that Yglesias condemns as the “incompetence dodge.” For Yglesias, invading Iraq—along with the broader effort to promote democracy in the Middle East through the policy of regime change—was a fool’s errand from the start.

In Yglesias’s estimation, the terrorist attacks of September 11 have not changed the world scene appreciably; thus, the U.S. should return to the foreign policy approach it took during the Clinton years. He asserts that this brand of foreign policy—a “liberal internationalism” that places its hopes in multilateralism, international institutions, and a restrained role for the United States in international affairs —“was working well in the 1990s.” Never mind that NATO’s war against Serbia (which Yglesias says he supported) had to be undertaken without the blessing of the United Nations, or that most Democrats in Congress opposed the Persian Gulf War despite the large international coalition that waged it. Nor does Yglesias mention the Rwandan genocide, a 100-day slaughter of nearly a million people that the U.N. did nothing to prevent. Moreover, Yglesias does not grapple with the problems presented by an important “liberal internationalist” institution of the nineties: the post–Gulf War sanctions regime in Iraq, which took an enormous toll on the Iraqi people while simultaneously being undermined by Saddam Hussein. Avoiding arguments that weaken his case, Yglesias alleges that those who oppose his brand of liberal internationalism wish to transform the United States into an “imperial superpower that seeks to use its national strength to dominate the world and needlessly heighten conflicts.”

If only Yglesias were as tough on America’s mortal enemies as he is with his own intellectual adversaries. While acknowledging that “many liberal hawks took note of the near-total absence of international backing for [the Iraq] war,” he attacks them for not recognizing “the reason that Bush’s position had so little support,” without bothering to consider whether liberal hawks might have had a point in assuming that China, Russia, and France were not pure of motive in their opposition to the invasion. He echoes Osama bin Laden when he argues that Islamist anger against the West is a justified response to foreign powers that “occupy Muslim land.” This is a bold assertion, and yet Yglesias doesn’t care to explore why Iran and Syria—countries where foreign soldiers haven’t set foot for decades—continue to be the two most active state sponsors of international terrorism. In fact, he urges the United States to engage Iran and Syrian in diplomatic talks about the future of Iraq so that all three can “work together to secure their common interests in that country.” What “common interest” supporters of a democratic, federal, and secular Iraq might share with the ayatollahs and Assads is left unsaid.

While charitable toward religious fascists and tyrants, Yglesias is suspicious of Western attempts to combat them. To argue against the usefulness of military force in eliminating terrorist groups, Yglesias points to Israel’s experience with organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, “which, obviously, the Jewish state had been trying to eliminate for quite some time with what one could only call limited success.” But one reason why Israel has not eradicated the threat from terrorist groups is that people like Yglesias keep demanding that Israel negotiate with, and thus legitimize, them. He writes, for instance, that Israel’s 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon in response to a series of PLO terrorist attacks represented a “policy of stubbornness.” Further, Yglesias admonishes any Democrat who refuses to rule out military action against Iranian nuclear sites. Indeed, he advocates a “grand bargain” with the mullahs in which we somehow convince them—without threatening force, of course—that constructing a nuclear bomb and making annihilationist threats against Jews are not in their interest. And while Israel was right to be worried about its security in the mid-twentieth century, when hostile neighbors surrounded it, it can now rest assured that “that threat no longer exists.” Why does Yglesias express such serenity when it comes to the malicious threats of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yet become apoplectic upon hearing the statements of Joe Lieberman? He writes as if his policy prescriptions were painfully obvious; those who believe otherwise are either bloodthirsty warmongers (conservatives) or soulless cynics (liberal hawks)....

Though Yglesias is at pains to distinguish his views from those of a hard leftist, he nonetheless ends up sounding like one. He sees no distinction between Saddam’s “aggressive warfare” against Kuwait in 1991 and America’s “aggressive warfare” against Saddam in 2003. Saddam’s campaign against the Kurds, by the way, was only “quasi-genocidal” (perhaps because Saddam did not kill every last Kurd?). He applauds the ridiculous Dennis Kucinich, who “was admirable in his ability to articulate a clear and coherent theory of foreign affairs” during the 2004 presidential election. He believes that rogue states and peaceful states should be treated the same, and lambastes the neoconservatives for adhering to a “two-tiered system of sovereignty” that deals with a country like Luxembourg differently than, say, Sudan. He also argues that no international action can be “legitimate” unless it has Russia’s and China’s support.

Kirchick has Yglesias down cold!

I'd add though, that Yglesias not only sounds like a radical leftist, he acts like one:

This photo shows Yglesias dressed in "terrorist chic."

As Mere Rhetoric indicates:

Terrorist chic is merely the latest retarded hipster trend to confirm the brutally obvious: spoiled liberal Ivy kids are not ready to talk to adults yet. The Left is not serious. They just don't get things. Like "terrorism is not ironic or cool". They just don't get it. They're in it for the smirks - and for their parochial back-patting sessions regarding their imagined cosmopolitan superiority.

That's way better than I could put it!

I would just add that Yglesias and his blogging ilk are taken as serious analysts among the left-wing surrender faction (by foks, for example, at the New York Times), not to mention the antiwar mandarins in the congressional Democratic majority.

Which is why I keep blogging about these hacks, making the case for the essential radicalism of "progressives" on the political left.

See also, "Diminishing International Relations: Left Bloggers and Foreign Policy."

Will the Real MLK Please Stand Up?

If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, what would he be like? How would we treat his message and accomplishments?

Would we admire him as America's most important civil rights leader? Would his message of America's unrealized goodness be honored, or would his later days of personal turmoil be evidence for the radical set which sees America - despite 40 years of progress after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1964, and decades of affirmative action - as an unmitigated evil, an irredeemable enormity, the greatest stain on human progress in world history?

Unfortunately, the revisionists are pressing the latter case. As I noted yesterday, to hear it now, Jeremiah Wright was speaking truth to power, just restating the case on America's evil that was established unimpeachably by Martin Luther King on the eve of his death.

Apparently that's the message of Dr. King's assassination, that the civil rights leader had to be silenced, because the reactionary white establishment risked losing authoritarian control amid the window dressing of change the rights revolution of the 1960s now apparently represents. For example, see the embrace of King's later uncertainties by Kai Wright over at American Prospect, "Dr. King, Forgotten Radical":

Generations after the man's murder, our efforts to look back on his life too often say more about our own racial fantasies and avoidances than they do about his much-discussed dream. And they obscure a deeply radical worldview that remains urgently important to Americans' lives. Today, I don't mourn King's death so much as I do his abandoned ideas.

We've all got reason to avoid the uncomfortable truths King shoved in the nation's face. It's a lot easier for African Americans to pine for his leadership than it is to accept our own responsibility for creating the radicalized community he urged upon us. And it's more comfortable for white America to reduce King's goals to an idyllic meeting of little black boys and little white girls than it is to consider his analysis of how white supremacy keeps that from becoming reality.

What I see when I read essays like this is the left's project to reduce the successes of the civil rights movement to a footnote, to a few pieces of legislation that put a happy face on America's essential banality of hegemonic state oppression and violence.

The changes of the 1960s were, of course, revolutionary. This is not objectively in doubt. What's now happening in activism and scholarship is to argue for an "incomplete revolution," which puts the onus back on the system of an alleged structural white supremacy to expand even further the legislative and policy regime of racial reparations that's been in place since Dr. King's early successes in forcing the nation to live up to the moral promise of the creed.

It's never enough, though. As long as there are dividends to be paid, racial victimization will be the modus operandi of the hardline forces of the radical left.

Rick Pearstein, for example, has exerpted portions for his writings which he claims provide proof of some enormously irretrievable evil in the country, where white supremacist, no doubt, continue to hold forth throughout the country's halls of power.

Pearstein even congratulates himself:

I'm so, so proud to be a historian today, and to be able to do my own little part to wrench Martin Luther King's awesome radicalism out of the the blood-crusted arms of grubby clowns like David Brooks who dare try to embrace him.

Is Pearlstein an academic historian, or a journalist? Can we trust his "wrenching" of King's radicalism from the arms of the white power structure.

The historian versus journalist distinction's important, as David Noon argues, in attacking the credibility of Juan Williams' thesis on racial victimology:

Williams' hackery deserves considerably more attention than it tends to receive. Though his work on Eyes on the Prize seems to have given him a permanent and inflated custodial sense of The True Meaning of the Civil Rights Movement, actual historians generally regard him as a joke.

Noon provides no evidence that "actual historians" do any such thing, although as an "actual" political scientist, I can tell you that actual academic research (here and here, for example) backs up many of Williams points, and conservative bloggers know a deligitmation campaign when they see one:

Long before the left-leaning journalist wrote “Enough,” a book with a decidedly conservative slant, Williams was considered a turncoat, his support for policies like affirmative action notwithstanding. One would assume that a man who penned “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965,” the companion volume to the award-winning PBS series of the same name, would be immune from such charges. But his conservative-like views on taboo issues leave him wide open for insults.

In any case, back to MLK.

Dr. King faced debilitating personal crises in his late 1960s activism, and his legacy of racial progress can't be accurately evaluated without recognizing the totality of his circumstances. As David Brooks pointed out yesterday:

The key tension in King’s life was over how to push relentlessly for change but within an existing moral structure. But by the late-60s many felt the social structure needed to be torn down. The assassin’s bullet set off a conflagration.

At King’s funeral, the marshals told the throngs that nobody should chew gum because it would look undignified. But niceties like that were obsolete.

Building the social fabric after the disruption of that period has been the work of the subsequent generations — weaving the invisible web of family, neighborhood and national obligations so that people stay in school, attend to their kids and have an opportunity to rise if they play by the rules.

Progress has been slow. Nearly a third of American high school students don’t graduate (half in the cities). Seventy percent of African-American kids are born out of wedlock. Poverty rates in Memphis have scarcely dropped.

Martin Luther King Jr. at least left behind a model of how to repair the social fabric. He was scholarly, formal, assertive and meticulously self-controlled in public. If Barack Obama’s presidential campaign represents anything, it is the triumph of King’s early-60s style of activism over the angry and reckless late-60s style. King was in crisis when he was gunned down. But his inspiration is outlasting his critics.

For more on the left's embellishment of King's "radicalism," see Memeorandum.

See also, "King Prophecies Foreshadowed Obama and Wright, Says Dyson."

Support Petraeus' Iraq Testimony

Freedom's Watch has a new video urging support for General David Petraeus, who's scheduled to update Congress on Iraq's progress next week, via YouTube:

See also my earlier post, "War Opponents Ready Attacks on Petraeus Testimony."

War Opponents Ready Attacks on Petraeus Testimony

General David Petraeus is scheduled for congressional testimony next week. The timing couldn't be better for antiwar surrender hawks. For over a year we've seen steady progress in Iraq, with an improving security picture, but the outbreak of sectarian violence in Basra cancels all that, to hear some tell it:

As stories hit the papers ... about the new Iraq intelligence assessment, I wanted to reiterate a point I made earlier in the week. While the Administration and others will cite the report as another sign that we are making progress in Iraq, with reporting of the classified document citing "significant security improvements and progress toward healing," and a more "upbeat analysis of conditions in Iraq than the last major assessment," there are some very important things to keep in mind.

The updated Iraq NIE analyzes only the subsequent six months after the previous update to the Iraq NIE, which was completed and released in August 2007. While it is deplorable that there is going to be no formal public document describing the findings—as has been the tradition in the past—due to DNI McConnel’s absurd declaration that “All future NIEs will not have unclassified key judgments”, it almost doesn’t matter. The New York Times article, for instance, states:

Among the factors seen as contributing to the ebb in violence in Iraq have been the cease-fire observed by the Mahdi Army, the militia founded by the cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

But since the report only examines the months ending in January 2008, this aspect is already outdated. The findings of this assessment highlight the reduction in violence from August 2007—when Sadr acquiesced to a ceasefire— to January 2008. The updated NIE would not include any examination of the ground changing events from last month.

March turned out to be the deadliest month in Iraq since August's NIE, with attacks against Americans reaching their highest level since the surge reached its peak last June. The upheaval that occurred in Basra and Baghdad, a success for Sadr’s forces and an embarrassment, from both an operational and perception perspective, for Maliki and tangentially America, makes the findings in the updated NIE effectively antiquated. The Washington Post nails this aspect:

Violence declined substantially late last year, although it leveled off during the initial months of 2008 and increased dramatically during last week's fighting between Iraqi and U.S. forces and Shiite militias in Baghdad, Basra and elsewhere in southern Iraq. Those conflicts are not substantively addressed in the new report, sources said.

This last line hints to way the Administration might also be reticent to turn the assessment into a declassified, public summary. If the document is so upbeat, wouldn't, politically, the Administration want to release a glossy version, bound and full of graphs, triumphantly trumpeted the improved security situation, especially as Petraeus and Crocker come to Capitol Hill next week? But after March, the NIE went from being a compendium of confidence to an embarrassing catalog of just how quickly "good" can turn to disaster, and so-called progress regresses into setback.

This analysis is like saying the Kansas City Royals should play in the World Series because of a hot streak in the last ten days of the season.

But recall what Daniel Henninger reminded us last week regarding Basra:

The Democrats appear so invested in a failure that a half-week of violence erases a year of progress.

But check out Tigerhawk, who's got a good post on Nancy Pelosi's plans to attack the general:

If you are among those who wonder why the Democrats have a reputation for being anti-military and soft on national defense, look no further:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned Army Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on Thursday not to "put a shine on recent events” in Iraq when they testify before Congress next week.

“I hope we don’t hear any glorification of what happened in Basra,” said Pelosi, referring to a recent military offensive against Shiite militants in the city led by the Iraqi government and supported by U.S. forces.

Yes, the Speaker of the House is "warning" the American theater commander in the middle of a war not to "put a shine on" in his report. Because, God forbid, he might suggest there was cause for optimism. We cannot, after all, have the general leading our soldiers actually saying there is a chance for victory. You know, in public, in front of television cameras where actual Americans might see him.

Ten thousand jihadis could surrender tomorrow and beg to be waterboarded and Nancy Pelosi would refuse to view it as victory.

Pelosi did say one thing that is certainly true but wholly inconsistent with her policy prescription: That Moqtada al-Sadr's ceasefire in Basra was on orders from Tehran.

Although powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr agreed to a ceasefire after six days of fighting, Pelosi wondered why the U.S. was caught off guard by the offensive and questioned how the ceasefire was achieved, saying the terms were "probably dictated from Iran.”

So, the senior Democrat in our national government acknowledges that Iran is waging a proxy war against the United States and the government of Iraq, and yet believes (i) it is in our national interest to cede Iraq to the Islamic Republic and (ii) the United States has no casus belli against Iran. And that the one American general who has shown some capacity for counterinsurgency needs to be warned against any suggestion of victory, tactical or otherwise.

Check.

I'll have more antiwar spin machinations in upcoming posts. Notice how MoveOn's not reprised it "General Betray Us" ad in anticipation of the Petraeus testimony - so far.

Photo Credit: ABC News

Daily Kos Smears McCain as Anti-King Racist

John McCain spent the day in Memphis commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr., and apologizing for his early opposition to the MLK national holiday:

John McCain honored the sacrifice and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and said today that he was wrong to oppose a federal holiday for King.

"I was wrong. I was wrong," he said in front of the Lorraine Motel after an impromptu tour of where King was assassinated 40 years ago. "We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing, and Dr. King understood this about his fellow Americans."

Some in the crowd heckled him, but others shouted, "We forgive you. We forgive you."

The presumptive Republican nominee also told the crowd, gathered in the rain, about when he learned of King's assassination, from the guards at the "Hanoi Hilton," where he was being held as a prisoner of war after being shot down over North Vietnam.

"I remember first learning what had happened here on the fourth of April 1968, feeling just as everyone else did back home, only perhaps even more uncertain and alarmed for my country in the darkness that was then enclosed around me and my fellow captives," he said. "In our circumstances at the time, good news from America was hard to come by. But the bad news was a different matter, and each new report of violence, rioting, and other tribulations in America was delivered without delay. The enemy had correctly calculated that the news from Memphis would deeply wound morale, and leave us worried and afraid for our country. Doubtless it boosted our captors' morale, confirming their belief that America was a lost cause, and that the future belonged to them.

"Yet how differently it all turned out," McCain said in remarks that he also plans to make later today to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights group that King led. "And if they had been the more reflective kind, our enemies would have understood that the cause of Dr. King was bigger than any one man, and could not be stopped by force of violence. Struggle is rewarded, in God's own time. Wrongs are set right and evil is overcome. We know this to be true because it is the story of the man we honor today, and because it is the story of our country."

The Democratic National Committee attacked McCain's statements as insincere, but Markos Moulitsas sinks to a new low in yellow-bellied smears:

McCain claims he voted against an MLK holiday because of ignorance about "the issue", as if he needed position papers and highly paid lobbyists to explain to him what Dr. Martin Luther King meant to our nation.

Still, even his claimed ignorance on the topic strains credibility. Perhaps because it just isn't true. Check out what he said about his POW captors in a 1987 interview with USA Today:

"They never gave us any meaningful news," McCain said. "They told us the day that Martin Luther King was shot, they told us the day that Bobby Kennedy was shot, but they never bothered to tell us about the moon shot. So it was certainly selected news."

McCain claims ignorance about MLK because his state didn't have black people, but he knew. His captors told him about it. The issue isn't one of "I didn't know about the issue", but one of "MLK ain't shit". What else could it be?

It's clear as day, especially considering that as late as 1987, McCain didn't consider the assassination of Martin Luther King "meaningful".

A sentiment, I'm sure, shared with his good friends Trent Lott and George Allen.

I watched newsclips from the Lorraine Hotel thoughout the day. McCain's statements appeared heartfelt, and his interaction with members of the audience appeared enthusiastic and genuine.

(Think Progress can't get enough of the McCain heckling).)

Today is not a national holiday itself, days when we normally get a break from intense political polarization - but today's recriminations over King's legacy are a sure sign of how nasty this year's campaign's going to be.

Check Memeorandum for more commentary.