Hillary Clinton is Vulnerable

The new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows Hillary Clinton remaining vulnerable on issues of trust and ideology. Here's the introduction:

Democrats enter the 2008 election campaign with powerful political advantages but face a tough and unpredictable battle because of the vulnerabilities of front-runner Hillary Clinton and the Democratic-controlled Congress.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that Americans have turned sharply away from President Bush and toward domestic issues favoring his partisan adversaries. Majorities believe the Iraq war can't be won and want most U.S. troops withdrawn by the dawn of a new president's term in 2009.

But offsetting that demand for change in the presidential contest are reservations about Sen. Clinton's truthfulness and ideology, even as Americans applaud her experience and leadership qualities. The result: She is in a virtual dead heat with leading Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani when the two are matched up.

The electorate's shifting agenda "does tilt the field against Republicans," said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who helps conduct the Journal/NBC survey. And yet his Democratic counterpart, Peter Hart, said, "This is an exceptionally close election" less than a year before Election Day.

Mrs. Clinton's rivals in both parties are moving to exploit the doubts revealed by the survey, which was conducted after last week's Democratic debate at which she faced accusations of evasiveness and double talk. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois used humor over the weekend, doffing a Halloween mask on the "Saturday Night Live" television program and declaring, "I have nothing to hide." Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina has attacked more sharply, challenging Mrs. Clinton in Iowa to remain in "tell-the-truth mode all the time."

Messrs. Edwards and Obama both run even against Mr. Giuliani, too, matching Mrs. Clinton's standing even though they aren't as well known as she is. But Mr. Obama would enter a general election with serious vulnerabilities of his own, since just 30% of Americans rate him positively on having enough experience for the presidency and just 29% rate him positively on "being a good commander in chief."

Mr. Giuliani has maintained an aggressive stance toward his in-state rival for the White House. While promoting his antiterror credentials with tough talk on Iran, the former New York City mayor slammed Mrs. Clinton for displaying "the worst of the Clinton years" by equivocating in the debate on driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. "If you think a question about driver's licenses is a tough question, a gotcha question, you're not ready for [Iranian leader Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad," Mr. Giuliani told a New Hampshire town hall meeting a few days ago.

Read the whole thing.

I've got a couple of recent posts on the shape of the 2008 elections (see here and here). Things are trending well for the Democrats. But as the Wall Street Journal poll shows here, in head to head match-ups Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic standard-bearer, is essentially tied with her Republican challengers. Especially interesting are Hillary's high negatives:

While a 51% majority gives her high marks for being "knowledgeable and experienced enough to handle the presidency," pluralities rate Mrs. Clinton negatively on honesty, likability and sharing their positions on the issues.

As I've said before, Republicans need to run an especially effective campaign. I think Clinton can be beat, but she's going to be formidable, despite of her recent gaffes.

Counterinsurgency in Iraq

Colin Kahl has a review essay on counterinsurgency in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs. One of the books he reviews is the Army's new counterinsurgency manual, which was authored by General David Petraeus, who became the supreme commander of Iraq operations in 2007.

Here's Kahl on the difficulty of counterinsurgency in Iraq since 2003:

When faced with a growing Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the immediate response of Pentagon officials and the U.S. military was denial. By the late summer and early fall of 2003, however, the reality signaled by daily attacks and a wave of massive bombings had finally sunk in. The military initially responded with a "search and destroy" approach to counterinsurgency, which fell uncomfortably, and dysfunctionally, between the extremes of hearts-and-minds and pure coercion. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who led U.S. forces during the first year of the war, was both inept at and uninterested in counterinsurgency. Efforts to protect the Iraqi population were ad hoc, varied tremendously from unit to unit, and were underresourced; most units defined the requirements of counterinsurgency solely in terms of "the enemy" and deployed overwhelming conventional firepower to kill or capture a growing list of "former regime elements," "anti-Iraqi forces," "bad guys," and "terrorists." Although troops took steps to minimize the risks to Iraqi civilians, many innocent Iraqis were shot at U.S. checkpoints and alongside convoys; many others were caught in the crossfire during daily raids and major offensives in Fallujah, Najaf, Sadr City, and elsewhere. Detention centers swelled as thousands of military-aged men were arrested in indiscriminate sweeps of Sunni towns, and evidence of abusive interrogations - most notably at Abu Ghraib - surfaced with gruesome regularity.

Since insurgents almost immediately reinfiltrated areas left unprotected after U.S. raids and offensives, often murdering those Iraqis who had collaborated during these operations, U.S. efforts accomplished little in the way of security. At the same time, heavy-handed tactics were just harsh enough to trigger a cycle of revenge without being sufficient to rule through brute force alone. The early U.S. approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq was thus Goldilocks in reverse: not hot enough, not cold enough, just wrong.

As the self-defeating nature of U.S. operations became apparent, the mindset of the U.S. military began to change. Starting in 2004 and accelerating in 2005, training and education in counterinsurgency were revamped. In November 2005, the White House released its "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," proclaiming clear, hold, build to be the road map for success, and soon the effort to rewrite U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine was in full swing. On the ground, U.S. forces had become much better at clearing insurgent strongholds without destroying them and alienating the inhabitants. And in a handful of instances - in Fallujah after the devastating November 2004 offensive, in Qaim and Tal Afar in late 2005, and in Ramadi in 2006 - the entire clear, hold, build package was actually employed with positive results.

Yet despite these efforts, two countervailing factors stood in the way of effective counterinsurgency. First, beginning in 2004, there was an attempt to reduce the perception of occupation and enhance force protection by pulling U.S. troops out of smaller bases within Iraqi cities and consolidating them into larger forward operating bases in outlying areas. As a result, throughout 2005 and 2006, most U.S. forces remained hunkered down on large bases rather than nested within communities to provide local security. Second, because of insufficient troop levels, the "hold" portion was difficult to execute. Knowing that the administration was reluctant to send more troops and that pressure was building for withdrawal, General John Abizaid (the head of Central Command) and General George Casey (who had replaced Sanchez in 2004 as the overall commander in Iraq) crafted a strategy to rapidly give Iraqi army and police units the responsibility of providing local security in areas cleared by U.S. forces. Unfortunately, a combination of inadequate capabilities and sectarian bias meant that Iraq's fledgling security forces were not up to the task. The resulting security vacuum, especially in Baghdad, accelerated the action-reaction spiral between Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias -- tipping Iraq into an all-out sectarian war in the spring of 2006.

In January 2007, President George W. Bush reversed his long-standing aversion to sending additional troops to Iraq by announcing the "surge." Petraeus replaced Casey and set about using the 30,000 additional forces in Baghdad and surrounding areas to implement the strategy outlined in the field manual he had helped author. Soon U.S. units dispersed to smaller bases, where they were paired with Iraqi forces to provide security for the local populations.

If the U.S. military had gone into the Iraq war with this doctrine and enough troops, success might have been possible. Now it may simply be too little, too late. The current conflict landscape in Iraq has, in many respects, passed the COIN FM by. Coalition forces in Iraq are not only attempting to defeat a Sunni insurgency but also trying to police a fierce sectarian civil war, limit the spread of the intra-Shiite gangland violence in the south, prevent Kurdish separatist ambitions from creating an ethnic conflict in Kirkuk or prompting Turkish intervention, and contain the regional spillover from all these conflicts. Counterinsurgency is hard enough. Pile on these additional missions (which in many cases have contradictory requirements for success), stir in U.S. force levels that remain inadequate in most of the country, sprinkle on incapable and sectarian Iraqi security forces, and add a U.S. domestic political environment with zero support for a long-term commitment - and you have a recipe for likely failure.

Kahl's an international security expert who published an outstanding piece on the U.S. military and civilian casualites in Iraq this last summer.

He seems a little bit behind the news cycle in this Foreign Affairs article, however. Things are going much better in Iraq's counterinsurgency warfare than he indicates. Yet he does provide a worthy conclusion to his article in arguing that the United States should be judicious in its application of our new successful doctrine of clear, hold, and build.

Congressional Democrats Confident on 2008 Prospects

The Washington Post reports that congressional Democrats are confident about their party's electoral prospects in 2008:

One year out from the election, congressional Democrats are increasingly confident they can tighten their hold on the House and Senate.

Although public approval of Congress has dipped dramatically since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) took control early this year, Democratic operatives believe they still can expand their majorities in 2008 by running hard against President Bush and his war policies. Republicans are also hampered by mounting retirements of veteran member and a huge disparity in fundraising by the two parties.

"I'd much rather be in our shoes than their shoes," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "George Bush and his legacy will be on the ballot."

Democrats wrested control of both chambers last year for the first time since 1994. The Democrats began the 110th Congress this year with a 233 to 202 vote edge over the Republicans, while on the Senate side Democrats and Republicans are evenly divided, 49 to 49, but two independents caucus with the Democrats, giving them a narrow ruling majority.

Van Hollen initially hoped his party could merely preserve their current majority in the 2008 election, after they picked up 30 seats last year, including many in conservative-leaning districts. Now, Van Hollen says he is "very much on offense" because of Bush's continued poor approval ratings and the sustained unpopularity of the Iraq war, both of which he expects to drag down a significant number of Republican incumbents.

Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, flatly predicted a pickup of GOP seats next year, but without setting a target. "We expect to win all 12 [Democratic incumbents] and pick up a nice number of Republican seats," he said.

But Republicans contend that Democrats are running next year's campaign based on the previous political battle, overlooking the fact that their nascent majority has few substantial achievements and Congress is now even more unpopular than Bush.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows Bush's approval rating at a career low mark of 33 percent, but approval of Congress is only 28 percent.

While Republicans acknowledge Bush is currently a drag on their approval ratings, they are increasingly insistent that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) will be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008 and that she will weigh down Democratic congressional candidates more than Bush with GOP candidates.

As I've noted before, 2008 is looking to be the best electoral environment for the Democrats in decades. Still, congressional elections are largely decided on localized conditions, so national polling data can be misleading. I'll admit, though, that the Democratic takeover of both chambers in 2006 was pretty stunning. Discontent in the electorate for next year will be significant if current trends stay stable, creating something of a mandate for change, rather than a shift to partisan realignment.

In any case, I'm not making any predictions at this point. Note, though, that Jim Geraghty at the National Review remains bullish on GOP hopes next year:

Gloom hangs over Republicans when they think of next year’s elections — but it shouldn’t. The sea change in political fortunes between 2004 and 2006 should not remind Righties only that the winds can change quickly — from a supportive breeze at your back, to a gale-force wind in your face — they should also be reminded that the political landscape can get better fast, too.

Next year could be a surprisingly good one for the GOP, though it’s clearly not guaranteed. The party will need good candidate recruitment, message discipline, a clear, unifying agenda, and a bit of good luck. But on a wide variety of fronts, there are pieces of good news that are overshadowed by the mainstream media’s preferred “Democratic-Tsunami Part Two” narrative.

It's still early, of course (so it's good to withhold prognostications), but I'm certain that continued progress in Iraq will bode well for GOP candidates.

Anti-Neoconservatism

Hatred of neoconservativism has become so intense that some on the left are talking about purging neoconservatives from American politics. James Kirchick, over at City Journal, takes a look at "anti-neocon fervor":

Today, no other political label gets thrown around as frequently, or with as much reckless abandon, as “neocon.” The most popular liberal blogs name and shame neocons, real or imagined, on a daily basis. The term is used in a fashion similar to the way “communist” was during the 1950s—an all-encompassing indictment—this time indicating an imperialistic and “warmongering,” even an “insane,” worldview. The anti-neocon fervor has reached truly McCarthyite proportions: just a few months ago, Steve Clemons of the left-wing New America Foundation argued in favor of “Purging the Neocons from the American Soul.”

The term “neoconservatism” has undergone a number of shifts in meaning. It was coined in 1973 by the socialist intellectual Michael Harrington to deride liberal thinkers such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, who had begun to criticize the welfare state’s excesses. By the 1980s, its meaning expanded to include a small group of former liberal intellectuals who hewed to a strong anti-Soviet line and had defected from the Democratic Party to support Ronald Reagan. They were motivated in part by an increased awareness of, and distinctive moral clarity about, human rights in international affairs, a worthy tradition whose liberal incarnation found embodiment in figures such as Senator Scoop Jackson, labor leaders George Meaney, Lane Kirkland, and Al Shanker, and intellectuals Bayard Rustin and Michael Walzer. None of these people held traditionally “movement conservative” views on economics or social issues—far from it; some of them were outright socialists. Neoconservatives had not been content with the détente policies of Richard Nixon, because they wanted not to coexist with communism, but to end it—a more ambitious goal that Reagan shared.

After September 11, the “neocon” label, which had fallen into disuse, came back into vogue as a way to categorize the intellectual godfathers behind the Bush Doctrine, which of course has advocated both military responses to terrorist threats and promoting liberty around the world via “regime change” (not all necessarily through military means). According to the leftist narrative, the neocons got us into the Iraq war—never mind the widespread assumption among intelligence services around the world that Saddam Hussein did have WMDs, or that large segments of the Democratic Party and liberal opinion leaders supported the invasion of Iraq, etc., etc.

By now, “neocon” has mutated into a political curse word to discredit not just those who happily accept their status as neoconservatives, but also anyone who merely believes that the West should respond in muscular fashion to national security threats, such as those posed by the cooperation of Iran, Syria, and North Korea on nuclear weapons technology and the equipping of terrorist groups around the world. The chief purpose of this emergent rhetorical style is to cast aspersions on anyone who believes, say, that Iran must not attain nuclear weapons, even if it requires war. International Herald Tribune columnist Roger Cohen, for instance, notes that “neocon has morphed into an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability and still thinks the muscular anti-totalitarian U.S. interventionism that brought down Slobodan Milosevic has a place, and still argues, like Christopher Hitchens, that ousting Saddam Hussein put the United States ‘on the right side of history.’”

Examples of this new, broader, definitional standard abound. In 2004, writing in The Nation, Michael Lind termed the National Endowment for Democracy—a nonpartisan institution that provides millions of dollars to democracy activists around the world—“the quintessential neocon institution.” French intellectual Bernard Henri-Lévy deems France’s Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, a “neoconservative,” a label that the socialist Kouchner would likely find surprising. But Kouchner, who founded Doctors Without Borders and was one of the very few left-wing supporters of NATO intervention in the Balkans, recently observed that “it is necessary to prepare for the worst” against Iran, adding, “The worst, it’s war”—enough to range him in the neocon camp, it seems. When Joe Lieberman, whose positions on domestic policy are indistinguishable from those of the majority of his colleagues in the Senate Democratic caucus, makes mere mention of Iranian or Syrian support for armed elements in Iraq, Matthew Yglesias—one of the most popular leftist bloggers, writing from his perch at The Atlantic—duly calls the senator a “neocon,” a “psychotic rightwinger,” and a “warmongerer.”

The long tradition of liberal anti-totalitarianism thus appears to have come to an end, at least in mainstream political rhetoric. What about human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch? Largely staffed by leftists, these days they escape the neoconservative charge because they generally presume moral equivalence between democracies and anti-American thuggocracies. Amnesty, for instance, has referred to Guantánamo as a “gulag” and Human Rights Watch has issued more press releases about the lack of gay rights in the United States than any other country on earth. Freedom House, on the other hand, which rates countries on a scale from 1 (most free) to 7 (least free), and explicitly ranks some nations (invariably Western democracies) as “more free” than others, has long been the bane of the leftist “human rights community.”

Welcome to the new political discourse.

Kerchik's piece is a classic. Note, though, how neoconservatism has a strong roots in domestic politics, although the ideology's recent notoriety is founded in foreign affairs.

I love sporting the neocon label. I get occasional drive-by anti-neocon attacks in the comments, but for the most part my shift to an unequivocal neoconservative identity at American Power has been well-received.

See my introductory post for more on my neoconservative turn. (I get a kick out of this idea of a "purge," by the way: It sounds so Stalinist.)

Out of the Archives: German Family Memoirs Reveal Nazi Past

This morning's Wall Street Journal has an extremely fascinating piece on Katrin Himmler, whose great uncle, Heinrich, was one of Nazi Germany's most infamous killers:

As a young girl, Katrin Himmler asked her grandmother about the man in a black suit in a photograph hanging on her living-room wall. Her grandmother didn't say much, but she cried.

The man in the picture was Ms. Himmler's grandfather Ernst, a brother of Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler. The little that Katrin's family did tell her about her grandfather, who disappeared during fierce fighting in Berlin in 1945, was that he was apolitical.

Decades later, Ms. Himmler discovered that her family's story was untrue. Her father, long suspicious, encouraged her in 1997 to go dig in wartime archives that the U.S. had recently returned to Germany. Ernst Himmler, she learned, joined Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' party as early as 1931. Two years later, he joined the SS guard, the special unit responsible for carrying out many of the Nazi regime's worst atrocities.

Now 40 years old and married to an Israeli Jew, Ms. Himmler says she was shocked when she found out that Ernst was in the SS. "It might sound strange, but I never considered this possibility," she says.

Ms. Himmler investigated further. She unearthed records of Heinrich's elder brother, Gebhard, and coaxed his children into sharing memories and letters. She wrote a book, "The Himmler Brothers," about her family's history -- and the trauma involved in uncovering it.

Ms. Himmler's book, published in German in 2005 and in English this past summer, is one of several recent memoirs by the children and grandchildren of old Nazis that aim to reflect on how the party affiliation affected their families. Another book, published this past summer in German, "Kind L 364," tells the story of Heilwig Weger, a girl reared in one of the Lebensborn settlements the SS built for orphans and other so-called Aryan children. Ms. Weger was later adopted by Oswald Pohl, a Nazi officer hanged in 1951 for war crimes. The book conveys the pain she felt at losing him, the only father she knew, while being ostracized by other children because of his actions. Later, she hid her background from her own children.

Himmler's upbringing provides a glimpse into postwar Germany's difficult process of dealing with the politics of memory:

In the postwar period, memoirs of Nazis or their families were long taboo. Ms. Himmler has vivid memories of those years. In high school one day, a classmate asked during a history lesson whether she was related to the Himmler. When she said yes, a tense silence gripped the room, Ms. Himmler recalls, after which the teacher continued her lesson as if nothing had happened.

"I think she lost an opportunity," says Ms. Himmler. "She could have used what happened to discuss the link that our generation bears to the past."

What's particularly interesting about Himmler is that she married an Israeli Jew:

She says her husband never held her family's past against her, even as he struggled with anger over his family's persecution by the Germans. His parents, who live in Israel, knew postwar Germany well from their own travels there and didn't object to their son's relationship with her.

The couple also try to teach the family's history to their child:

Today, Katrin Himmler and her husband live with their 8-year-old son in an apartment not far from the Reichstag, the seat of the German Parliament. They talk a lot with the boy about the past. Ms. Himmler says she isn't sure whether he has yet put it together that his mother's side of the family once tried to exterminate his father's.

Of all the nations of the advanced industrialized democracies, Germany is the most conscious of its wartime history, and no country has made a greater effort at cultural transformation. In escaping its past, the German polity has shed its extremely authoritarian cultural legacy, undertaking a re-engineering process that has produced widespread support for democratic values.

The story of the Himmler family is a particularly powerful reminder of the process.

Democrats and Torture

Be sure to read Alan Dershowitz's commentary piece in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Dershowitz addresses the absence of bipartisan cooperation in the war on terror following 9/11. He notes, though, that hopes for interparty unity on national security are not realistic given the Democratic Party's impulse to antiwar pacifism:

This pacifistic stance appeals to the left wing of the democratic electorate, which may have some influence on the outcome of democratic primaries, but which is far less likely to determine the outcome of the general election. Most Americans--Democrats, Republicans, independents or undecided--want a president who will be strong, as well as smart, on national security, and who will do everything in his or her lawful power to prevent further acts of terrorism.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans may watch Michael Moore's movies or cheer Cindy Sheehan's demonstrations, but tens of millions want the Moores and Sheehans of our nation as far away as possible from influencing national security policy.

Here's Dershowitz making the case for the selective use of coercive interrogations to obtain real-time actionable intelligence:

Consider, for example, the contentious and emotionally laden issue of the use of torture in securing preventive intelligence information about imminent acts of terrorism--the so-called "ticking bomb" scenario. I am not now talking about the routine use of torture in interrogation of suspects or the humiliating misuse of sexual taunting that infamously occurred at Abu Ghraib. I am talking about that rare situation described by former President Clinton in an interview with National Public Radio:

"You picked up someone you know is the No. 2 aide to Osama bin Laden. And you know they have an operation planned for the United States or some European capital in the next three days. And you know this guy knows it. Right, that's the clearest example. And you think you can only get it out of this guy by shooting him full of some drugs or waterboarding him or otherwise working him over."

He said Congress should draw a narrow statute "which would permit the president to make a finding in a case like I just outlined, and then that finding could be submitted even if after the fact to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court." The president would have to "take personal responsibility" for authorizing torture in such an extreme situation. Sen. John McCain has also said that as president he would take responsibility for authorizing torture in that "one in a million" situation.

Although I am personally opposed to the use of torture, I have no doubt that any president--indeed any leader of a democratic nation--would in fact authorize some forms of torture against a captured terrorist if he believed that this was the only way of securing information necessary to prevent an imminent mass casualty attack. The only dispute is whether he would do so openly with accountability or secretly with deniability. The former seems more consistent with democratic theory, the latter with typical political hypocrisy.

There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works--it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.

The kind of torture that President Clinton was talking about is not designed to secure confessions of past crimes, but rather to obtain real time, actionable intelligence deemed necessary to prevent an act of mass casualty terrorism. The question put to the captured terrorist is not "Did you do it?" Instead, the suspect is asked to disclose self-proving information, such as the location of the bomber.

I'm personally not opposed to the use of torture in the name of national security. As I've noted before, Jerome Slater provided the argument in favor of the principled use of coercive measures as part of the broader terror war:

If we are to succeed in the war against terrorism, we surely must do much more than defend ourselves against terrorist attacks. The broader task is to do whatever can be reasonably and legitimately done to address the causes of terrorism, as well as the motivations of terrorists to target the United States....

Put differently, so long as the threat of large-scale terrorist attacks against innocents is taken seriously, as it must be, it is neither practicable nor morally persuasive to absolutely prohibit the physical coercion or even outright torture of captured terrorist plotters—undoubtedly evils, but lesser evils than preventable mass murder. In any case, although the torture issue is still debatable today, assuredly the next major attack on the United States—or perhaps Europe—will make it moot.

Dershowitz concludes his essay by noting that the Democrats may lose the 2008 presidential election:

...if they are seen as the party of MoveOn.org, Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Dennis Kucinich and those senators who voted against Judge Mukasey because he refused to posture on a difficult issue relating to national security.

I hope he's right.

Targeted Force Only Option Left on Iran

Over at the New York Post, John Bolton argues that after four years of failed negotiations, a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear problem is beyond hope. Ministers from the permanant members of the U.N. Security Council met last week for another round of multilateral futility in stopping Iran's march to nuclear readiness:

This pattern of failed diplomacy has gone on for over four years, starting with the efforts of Britain, France and Germany ("the EU-3") to talk Iran out of its pursuit of nuclear weapons....

Unfortunately, the EU-3's fascination with negotiations lost sight of the ultimate objective - preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons - and became an end in itself. For the EU-3, the process became more important than the substance, especially the unstated but obvious EU-3 agenda of dealing with a proliferation threat their way, rather than resorting to military force, as the United States did against Saddam Hussein.

The result of more than four years of EU-3 negotiation is that Iran is more than four years closer to a nuclear-weapons capacity, and the United States and the world are in greater danger. I believe it was obvious from the outset that Iran wasn't going to renounce its quest for nuclear weapons voluntarily because it was part of a much larger strategy. The stakes were and are high: whether Iran and its radical Shiite version of Islam become dominant throughout the Muslim world, whether largely Persian Iran achieves effective hegemony in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East and whether a nuclear, terror-financing Iran emerges on the global stage as a real power.

Chitchat by complacent and languorous European and State Department negotiators isn't enough to divert a theocratic autocracy like Iran's from its long-standing strategic course. To the contrary, the years of failed diplomacy gave Iran something it couldn't have bought with all of its oil revenues: time. Time is usually on the side of the would-be proliferators, and that has been true in spades for Iran. While the EU-3 thought they were "negotiating," Iran was perfecting the critical technique of converting uranium from a solid to a gas and then mastering the uranium-enrichment process to produce weapons-grade uranium. The timing on actual weaponization is now essentially in the hands of the mullahs. With oil at $90 a barrel, resources aren't a problem.

Thus, as a consequence of heedless, failed diplomacy, our options on Iran are limited, unless, as some believe, we can live with a nuclear Iran. Of course, that would leave to the likes of President Ahmadinejad the decision whether and when to use Iran's weapons. This isn't a happy prospect. As Israel's U.N. Ambassador Dan Gillerman once said insightfully, "Ahmadinejad denies the existence of the original Holocaust while preparing for the next one."

Regime change in Iran is the preferred option, and a feasible one given the regime's weakness. Rampant economic discontent caused by 28 years of economic mismanagement, the desires of younger Iranians to be freed from the mullahs' theology and dissatisfaction among Iran's ethnic minorities are all fertile breeding grounds for discontent. If we had supported and encouraged this dissent for the last four years, we might now be on the verge of regime change.

Absent regime change, the targeted use of force against Iran's program is the only option left. Risky and unattractive as it is, the choice may well be between the use of force and a nuclear Iran, which is really not a choice at all. Iran is already asserting itself in ways profoundly hostile to our interests and those of our close friends. Imagine adding Iranian nuclear weapons to that equation. That's why surrender is not an option.

Bolton's clarity on the Iranian threat is unsurpassed (a point that obviously doesn't sit well with the hard-left surrender forces).

Bolton's new book is Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad. The book's reviewed in today's Wall Street Journal, and Brendan Simms, the reviewer, notes that Bolton's no neocon.

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UPDATE: Via Goat's Barnyard, be sure to check out Bolton's interview with Hugh Hewitt at Townhall.

McCain Standing Firm in GOP Nomination Race

E. J. Dionne notes that John McCain's still standing in the GOP nomination race:

The strangest thing about John McCain's campaign for president is that it's supposed to be dead, but it isn't. This is a real nuisance for his competitors.

The comeback is not showy or dramatic. And it's true that while McCain is better off than he was in July, when his campaign imploded in a dazzling display of financial mismanagement and staff recriminations, he still faces a more difficult route to the GOP nomination than his well-financed rivals, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney.

McCain himself, the overwhelming Republican favorite a year ago, is cheerfully humble in characterizing his standing. "We've got a long way to go, but we are in the mix," he said Sunday on CNN's "Late Edition." In the mix is a big improvement over being out.

Nationally, McCain got a boost over the weekend when a new Post-ABC News poll showed him in second place to Giuliani. The former New York mayor had 33 percent; McCain, 19 percent; and the stalled Fred Thompson16 percent. Romney, who leads in both Iowa and New Hampshire, came in at 11 percent, and Mike Huckabee had 9 percent.

The most interesting numbers are those of Huckabee and McCain. The former is finally being taken seriously not only by the media but also by Republican voters. McCain rose from just 12 percent a month ago.

Thompson's sluggishness has been a form of life-support for McCain. Nowhere more so than in New Hampshire, which McCain took by storm seven years ago against George W. Bush. This state's early primary only recently looked to be Romney's launching pad to national stardom -- or Giuliani's opportunity to finish off Romney. Now Romney and Giuliani have to calculate how McCain might figure in their plans.

The mood of McCain's loyalists here combines relief with the restrained glee that comes from walking away from a car wreck in one piece. Jim Barnett, the candidate's New Hampshire state director, traces McCain's local comeback to his strong debate performance in early September and his renewed emphasis on the freewheeling town-meeting formats that made him so many friends in this state.

Barnett points to a moment during a mid-October gathering in Hopkinton where McCain confronted a questioner who spoke of the "anger the average European Christian, native-born American feels when they see their country turning into a multicultural chaos Tower of Babel."

McCain has tried to appease conservative critics of his support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants by stressing the need to secure the nation's borders first. His new stance, he says, reflects "a lesson learned about what the American people's priorities are."

But at the Hopkinton meeting, McCain was his old, combative self. He condemned his interlocutor's language and declared that he was "grateful to live in a nation that has been enriched by people coming to our nation from around the world." The applause, Barnett recalls with pride, "went on for a long time."

Yet there is also cold calculation on the part of Republicans who are giving McCain a second look. Their challenge is to find a candidate who can broaden the party's currently anemic appeal while still holding it together.

As I've said before, "McCain Deserves a Second Look."

I would be surprised, though, if he's able to overtake the party's frontrunners in the weeks remaining before January's caucuses and primaries. Perhaps Mitt Romney's peaked in New Hampshire, where he's currently holding a decisive lead in the polls. If so, McCain might stage a reprise of his 2000 primary upset in the Granite State. There's also Rudy Giuliani to consider. Currently a national frontrunner, Giulani's not well-respected in Iowa and he's just recently begun to invest major resources to the New Hampshire race.

A win or place in New Hampshire could help McCain replenish his war chest and bolster his campaign heading into Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008 , when over a dozen states will hold their nominating contests.

Go McCain!

Bush Family Will Not Endorse Presidential Candidate

The Bush family, one of the greatest political dynasties in recent American history, will not endorse a GOP candidate for the presidency, as this Washington Post story indicates:

With no certain Republican front-runner and the most open-ended nominating process in decades, it is perhaps no surprise that the party's first family is just as divided in settling on a candidate. While its most powerful members -- President Bush, his father and his brother Jeb -- have remained conspicuously on the sidelines, their public statements and body language carefully analyzed for evidence of whom they privately favor, other family members have spread their endorsements around.

George P. Bush's little brother, whom everyone in the family calls "Jebby," has signed on to the campaign of former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani as the young professionals chairman in Florida. Their aunt Doro, the president's younger sister, co-hosted a Washington fundraiser in February for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. One of the president's brothers, Neil M. Bush, attended a Texas event for Romney.

In a brief response to an e-mail inquiry last week, Jeb Bush said: "I don't know where the other Bushes sympathies are. I know I admire all of the candidates for different reasons. My boys made their decisions on their own. I am proud of them for their involvement."

In fact, the former governor has praised all his party's major candidates. In a recent interview online, he said Giuliani has "high energy and tremendous personality," and he called Thompson a "committed conservative." He said he admires the courage of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and praised Romney's "intellectual curiosity," saying "he's incredibly smart and asks the questions necessary."

President Bush has said he will make no endorsement during the primary season. His father, former president George H.W. Bush, who is 83, has met with several of the leading GOP candidates but has made it clear to close associates that he has little desire to jump into the fray in 2008.

The lack of political action represents only the second time since the 1970s that the Bush dynasty has not been actively involved in a presidential election.

To be sure, the campaigns of Republican candidates are filled with former staffers and advisers from the Bush world. But the family members are not focused on electing one of their own, as they were in 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000 and 2004.

"They don't feel entitled to push or pull the party in any direction," said Jim McGrath, who was a speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush and served as his post-White House chief of staff in Texas for many years. "They are quite content to let the political marketplace sort itself out."

Political endorsement by the Bush family opens up access to the family's phenomenal fundraising machine, one of the most valuable assets in contemporary politics. Winning the support of the Bush family would help a candidate in winning the GOP's 2008 presidential nomination.

But the primaries are close at hand, and as powerful as the Bush name is, at this point in the race a late endorsement might not change the dynamics of the GOP's nomination contest. Yet, the top candidates in both parties have announced that they'll forego public financing in the general election, so the eventual GOP standard-bearer should be able to put the Bush money machine to good use in balancing Hillary Clinton's own big money operation.

Neoconservatism, Pakistan, and U.S. Foreign Policy

A unfriendly commenter to my recent post on Pakistan's political crisis remarked: "You reap what you sow, neocon."

As is my practice, I simply ignore drive-by rants such as this, especially as they are normally anonymous, Ill-informed, and meant to intimidate. Besides, I have neither the time nor the inclination to fill-in the clueless on the necessary political trade-offs in a nation's quest for security in international relations.

In the case of the Bush administration, Pakistan since 9/11 has been a front-line ally in the war on terror. Yet President Bush bargained with the devil in backing the regime in Islamabad, which moved away from democracy with Perfez Musharraf's coup d'etat of 1999. The Los Angeles Times discusses the new calculus of American foreign policy amid Pakistan's state of emergency. Democracy or security, is that the question?

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf seemed to be one of the Bush administration's most valuable foreign friends after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he denounced Al Qaeda and the Taliban and joined the U.S.-declared war on terrorism.

But the value of that friendship has come into question again and again in the last six years, and may be most in doubt today.

Musharraf's declaration of emergency rule Saturday has isolated him at home and abroad, and suggests that President Bush has risked his stated goals and principles for an ally who couldn't deliver on a fundamental promise: to hold together his turbulent country while facing down militant Islamists.

In Musharraf, an American president sometimes accused of naive neoconservative faith in democracy made the ultimate realist's bargain to help prop up an authoritarian leader.

The step Musharraf has taken now has raised fears that the world may end up with a nuclear-armed state that is at once more fractured and host to a stronger Islamic militant force.

The move is making Bush's deal look more like the one U.S. presidents made with the shah of Iran, whose authoritarian rule opened the way in 1979 to a resentfully anti-U.S. uprising and Islamist regime.

Bush has sought to reassure Americans that Musharraf, an army general who took power in a bloodless coup in 1999, was worthy of their trust. "He shares the same concerns about radicals and extremists," Bush said at an Aug. 9 news conference.

Yet from the beginning, U.S. officials have acknowledged concerns that the Pakistani government was not doing enough to foster democracy and halt nuclear proliferation. And an increasing number of U.S. officials have become convinced that Musharraf's regime hasn't done enough to fight militant Islamists.

One of the administration's top priorities has been halting the spread of nuclear know-how. Yet Musharraf has not been willing to allow the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency to interview A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, which had been a source of nuclear knowledge for countries such as North Korea and Iran.

Musharraf promised Bush from the beginning that he would eventually give up his position as head of the army, Pakistan's most powerful institution, and hold free and fair elections at the risk of ending his own rule. Yet his declaration of emergency rule has been widely judged a desperate attempt to hold onto power as the Pakistani Supreme Court deliberated on the validity of his recent reelection.

And though Musharraf's government has lost hundreds of soldiers since 2001 fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban, there always has been an ambivalence about the fight. Some members of the army's intelligence agency and other units have had ties to radical groups and believe they have a strategic value as a proxy in facing down rivals such as India.

And the Pakistani regime is wary of taking too many casualties or alienating parts of its population in a fight that many Pakistanis believe is largely inspired by the United States.

Many Pentagon officials have become increasingly frustrated by their partnership with the Pakistanis, believing that the army is all too eager to get the billions of dollars in U.S. aid it has received since 2001 but less eager to join the fight.

The dilemma for the U.S. has been building all year. In a September follow-up to his July/August analysis of Pakistan's political crisis in Foreign Affairs, Daniel Markey argues that the U.S. has no choice but to work with Pakistan to achieve both democracy and security. Markey reflects on Pakistan's summer crisis involving the state's attack on the Red Mosque in Islamabad:

On July 10, after a siege of several months, Pakistan's security forces stormed Islamabad's Red Mosque, leaving at least 100 people dead. In a somber address to the nation, President Pervez Musharraf declared that the terrorists within the mosque compound had "challenged the government's writ as a whole," by seeking to introduce a Taliban-style legal system into the heart of Pakistan's capital city. His message was a clear articulation of the new strategic outlook: Pakistan's Islamist militants could no longer be viewed as pliant tools, but must instead be confronted as a threat to the nation.

Musharraf then backed his words with a renewed military offensive in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Unfortunately, the militants responded with a series of deadly and demoralizing suicide attacks throughout the country and a unilateral withdrawal from the ceasefire "deals" they had struck with the Pakistani government. In late August, hundreds of Pakistani troops were reportedly taken prisoner by an extremely small contingent of Taliban fighters--an unprecedented event in Pakistani history. And just last week, an attack on the elite Special Services Group in the commandos' mess hall left 15 soldiers dead. There is strong evidence that the army is deeply shaken and that at least some officers are looking for ways to sidestep a fight that they still do not see as their own.

Facing this apparent crisis of confidence, Pakistan has received precious little encouragement from the United States. Over the summer, Pakistanis were treated to a series of highly publicized statements--most famously by Senator Barack Obama--suggesting that the United States should take unilateral action against militants inside Pakistan if Musharraf's government proves unwilling or unable to do the job. Whether or not the United States might someday seize the opportunity to take a clear shot at Osama bin Laden is beside the point. Threatening Pakistani sovereignty to play out a hypothetical scenario was bad diplomacy. It undermined Pakistan's trust in the United States at a sensitive time.

On the political front, pre-election jockeying for power accelerated and took a few surprising turns. Musharraf compounded his blunder of suspending Pakistan's Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry with a series of clumsy attempts to manage the fallout, each backfiring worse than the last. Musharraf's regime succeeded in harassing the media, stirring up bloody ethnic tensions in Karachi, and alienating Pakistan's lawyers as well as a wide cross-section of moderate opinion leaders. Washington's reaction did not help. The U.S. government's quiet acceptance of Chaudhry's suspension gave Pakistanis no reason to believe that the United States was sincere in promoting either the rule of law or judicial independence in Pakistan.

In the end, Musharraf lost popular support and failed in his bid to remove the chief justice. Musharraf's political rivals quickly seized the opening offered by a more independent, even oppositional, judiciary. Foremost among these rivals, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif appealed the terms of his ten-year exile, won the right to return to Pakistan, and staged a dramatic comeback attempt on September 10. In preparation, government security forces put Islamabad on lockdown and jailed thousands of Sharif's party organizers around the country. Upon landing, Sharif was quickly bundled up and "re-exiled" to Saudi Arabia to live under the watchful eye of the royal family.

The forceful steps that Musharraf's party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid-e-Azam (PML-Q), took against Sharif merely confirmed a widely-held belief that the party has failed to win the popular support needed to stave off even a recycled and discredited politician. In recent months, the prospect of Sharif's return to politics became a rallying point for more conservative political parties--including Islamists. Although his deportation may be a setback for those advocating a completely level electoral playing field, it may also have served the interests of moderates and progressives seeking to marginalize Pakistan's extreme right.

The other former prime minister from the 1990s, Benazir Bhutto, has taken a different approach in her summer power play. Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party still commands significant grass-roots support, but she has sought to negotiate her way into Pakistan by sealing a deal with Musharraf that would pave the way for her return to the prime minister's office. The deep mutual distrust between Bhutto and Musharraf, combined with the opposition of the conservative PML-Q leadership, who would lose power in such an arrangement, has until now prevented a deal.

Given the paucity of other viable options, Washington should support such a power-sharing agreement in order to facilitate freer and fairer national elections this fall. The United States should also continue to deliver robust military and diplomatic support to the Pakistani army.

If the United States plays its cards correctly over the next six months, Pakistan could become an even more stable U.S. partner in the war on terror; Islamabad's military leadership could be complemented by a cast of popularly elected civilians; and the foundations could be laid for a transition to sustainable democratic governance.

The alternative - allowing Musharraf and the PML-Q to run rigged elections and silence opponents - will only lead to harsher authoritarianism. Such a strategy would very clearly place Musharraf and the United States on one side, unifying the spectrum of Pakistan's political opposition - from progressives to Islamists - on the other. The balance would eventually tip, leaving Washington with few friends in Islamabad, and little hope of advancing U.S. interests, either in terms of democracy promotion or counter-terrorism.

Well, Pakistan's not becoming more stable, and harsher authoritarianism is here. Musharraf may have been a necessary exception to the administration's neoconservative impulse toward democracy promotion, but our long-run interests will be to put aside realism and push Islamabad back toward constitutionalism. Both ideals and interests will be served with such a move.

Democratic Frustration on National Security

This morning's Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece on the Democratic Party frustration and impotence on foreign policy:

The way in which Senate Democrats wavered and then consented to the confirmation of Michael B. Mukasey as attorney general reflects the party's broader struggle to make headway on its national-security agenda, despite President Bush's unpopularity.

On questions such as Mr. Mukasey's stance on waterboarding, warrantless wiretapping and the war in Iraq, Democrats have been stymied by Republicans in Congress and the White House. That has sparked frustration among supporters, especially those on the left, who anticipated that last year's congressional takeover would force some policy changes.

These dashed expectations are one reason polls give Congress an approval rating lower than Mr. Bush's. The difficulties faced by Democrats on these issues look certain to complicate the party's bid to expand House and Senate majorities and regain the White House in 2008, a wartime election in which national security will be a major issue.

Democrats acknowledge the difficulty in speaking up for civil liberties while maintaining a tough stand on homeland security and terrorism.

"On issues of wiretapping or torture or any of the other tools used to fight terrorism, it's a complicated message to sell," says Stephanie Cutter, a Democratic strategist in Washington who worked on John Kerry's presidential campaign. She says Democrats in Congress and their supporters have "faced a bit of an awakening that they're not getting everything they wanted."

On Friday, two senior Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Charles Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California, rescued President Bush's pick to lead the Justice Department when they announced their plan to vote for his confirmation when it comes up for a vote tomorrow.

Mr. Mukasey had run into trouble earlier in the week after he refused to define waterboarding as torture and was imprecise in answering questions about the White House's assertion of broad presidential powers. As a result, a handful of Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee said they would vote against the nominee, threatening to spoil what had previously been thought to be an easy confirmation.

Liberal groups were stirred to action by the uproar over waterboarding -- an interrogation technique that simulates drowning -- and by President Bush's public statements castigating Democrats for not giving Mr. Mukasey a speedy confirmation. Left-leaning groups and bloggers over the weekend renewed criticism that despite winning the House and Senate a year ago, Democrats were "caving in" to the president.

Noting tickles me more than to see the Democrats and their hard-left fringe backers up in arms over administration successes on national security and the war. The piece concludes with the remark from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi giving confirming public unhappiness with Congress:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, speaking at a recent news conference, said she doesn't blame Americans for giving Congress low marks, given that the party hasn't "been effective in ending the war in Iraq." She added: "If you asked me in a phone call, as ardent a Democrat as I am, I would disapprove of Congress as well."

Of course, by "Congress," Pelosi means the Senate:

Frustrated by lack of legislative progress in the Senate, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is increasingly touting Democratic achievements in the House.

Her statements represent a significant shift from the stance she took six months ago. In March, the Speaker celebrated the first 100 days of the congressional majority by stating, “Democrats have brought the winds of change to the Capitol.”

When pressed on the slow progress of spending bills during ABC’s Sunday morning talk show “This Week,” Pelosi passed the buck to the Senate, saying, “In the House we’ve passed every one of our bills.”

The change in talking points at the top reflects a deepening frustration among House Democrats, who are irritated with lack of progress in the Senate and are starting to publicly press their Senate counterparts to stop letting Republicans use procedural tactics and instead force Republicans to carry out a filibuster, if that’s what it takes.

Pelosi's apparently thinking strategically, working hard now to create the impression of policy effectiveness in the House in anticipation of next year's congressional elections. It probably doesn't occur to her that the Democratic Party's underlying problem is its weakness on national security.

See more here.

The GOP and Black Voters: Courting Victimologists?

The Republican presidential candidates skipped participation in a November 4 debate sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus.

Was this snub or strategy? Stuart Rothenberg makes the case against Republican Party outreach to black voters. If the black majority looks to government as a protector and source of handouts, the GOP platform of individualism and personal responsibility will be unattractive:

A shot was recently fired across the GOP's bow about the cancellation of the scheduled Nov. 4 presidential debate co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Institute and Fox News, and you can bet more shots will be fired over the next few months.

Writing less than a week ago, Huffington Post political reporter Michael Roston commented that "it appears that some GOP frontrunners are once again letting an opportunity to appear before African-American voters lapse, just as they decided to sit out a black voter forum hosted last month by Tavis Smiley."

Roston was referring to a September debate in Maryland that leading GOP contenders skipped, citing schedule conflicts.

But why would Republicans even consider participating in a debate sponsored by the CBC Institute, an arm of the Congressional Black Caucus, which includes 43 Democratic Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and which has been consistently critical of President Bush and Republican policies?

The CBC is essentially a Democratic group -- when he was in the House, Oklahoma Republican J.C. Watts refused to join it because of its agenda. Given that, it isn't surprising that less than a week before Roston's column appeared on the Internet, the CBC issued a news release announcing that the group was "outraged" by the confirmation of Leslie Southwick to the 5th Circuit Court, a nomination supported unanimously by Republican Senators.

There is no doubt that Republicans need to increase their support in the minority community, including among black voters. That's not a new observation. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp made that point many years ago, and Ken Mehlman reiterated it during his term as chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The problem, however, is more obvious than the solution. While Republicans have recently nominated black candidates for governor in Ohio and Pennsylvania and for the Senate in Maryland, the party has had only limited success wooing black voters.

Part of the GOP's problem is that the national black political leadership is both generally liberal and joined to the Democratic Party at the hip. That's good for Democrats and bad for Republicans, since it invariably sets up black political leaders against the GOP when controversies emerge.

To the extent that the CBC (or Al Sharpton) represents African-American opinion, it's unlikely that Republicans will get much of a break, at least as long as the party holds to its generally conservative views.

Conservative (i.e. Republican) African-Americans have tried to set up corresponding organizations to well-established black groups, as conservatives have tried to do to represent and speak for women and seniors. But any honest appraisal of those groups is that they've generally met with only minimal success. And in some cases, that's giving them more credit than they are due.

It's difficult to "create" a corresponding conservative leadership in the black community when most African-Americans share the general outlook of existing leaders. And that too is a problem for GOP strategists: The existing black leadership both reflects grass-roots opinion and reinforces existing preferences and assumptions by continually pounding on Republican policies and political personalities.

On certain social issues, black voters (and Hispanics, for that matter) are more conservative than their white, liberal allies. But that really doesn't matter, since they don't vote on those issues.

Though it admittedly is a generalization and there are exceptions, the GOP's fundamental problem is that African-Americans think of the government as a protector and benefactor, while most Republicans (and all conservatives) see government as a problem. As long as that is the case, and specifically as long as affirmative action is an issue, Republican opportunities in the black community are extremely limited.

I'd like to see some hard data supporting this hypothesis, but I have no doubt that Rothenberg hits the nail on the head.

Hillary Clinton Stumbling and Bumbling in Philadelphia

Via Goat's Barnyard, here's more gold-mine material on Hillary Clinton from Tuesday night's presidential debate in Philadelphia:

Also, check out Kate Michelman's Hillary smackdown, at the Los Angeles Times:

A prominent feminist, allied with the presidential campaign of former Sen. John Edwards, accused Democratic front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on Saturday of "disingenuously playing the victim card" by infusing her campaign with messages about gender.

"When unchallenged, in a comfortable, controlled situation, Sen. Clinton embraces her political elevation into the 'boys club,' " Kate Michelman, the former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, wrote in a posting on a blog of the liberal group Open Left.

"But when she's challenged, when legitimate questions are asked, questions she should be prepared to answer and discuss, she is just as quick to raise the white flag and look for a change in the rules," Michelman said. "It's trying to have it both ways."

The missive by Michelman, a senior advisor to the Edwards campaign, was the latest salvo in a week in which gender flared as an issue in the Democratic presidential contest. Her cutting comments were publicized by the Edwards campaign in a press release.

The issue erupted after the Clinton campaign complained that male Democratic rivals at Tuesday night's presidential debate in Philadelphia had subjected her to a "pile-on."

At the debate, Clinton appeared to give nonspecific answers on several topics, such as on whether she supported the controversial plan of New York's Democratic governor, Eliot Spitzer, to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. Democratic rivals seized the moment as an opportunity to portray Clinton as a calculating candidate with chameleon-like views.

I shredded Clinton for her "nuanced" positions in an earlier post.

Still, I don't think Clinton's recent gaffes have derailed her inevitability as the Democratic standard-bearer. Note though that Dick Morris and Eileen McGann suggest Hillary can be beaten in Iowa. Interesting. A couple of more flops like this last week and I might be persuaded.

The Danger of Pakistan

Pakistan's political crisis has has thrown that country's future in doubt, the Washington Post notes:

Pakistan's government on Sunday continued a nationwide crackdown on the political opposition, the media and the courts, one day after President Pervez Musharraf imposed emergency rule and suspended the constitution in a bid to save his job.

Police throughout the country raided the homes of opposition party leaders and activists, arresting hundreds. Top lawyers were also taken into custody, and at the offices of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in the eastern city of Lahore, 70 activists were detained. Journalists covering the raid had their equipment confiscated by police, and were ordered off the premises.

The international advocacy group Human Rights Watch issued a statement condemning the move as "an appalling attack on human rights defenders."

Up to 500 opposition activists had been arrested in the last 24 hours, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said Sunday.

Aziz said the extraordinary measures would remain in place "as long as it is necessary." Aziz said parliamentary elections could be postponed up to a year, but no decision has been made regarding a delay.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that the United States would review its $150 million a month assistance program to Pakistan in response to Musharraf's declaration of emergency rule.

Over at The Weekly Standard, Bill Roggio notes the disastrous implications of Musharraf's state of emergency:

In his address to the nation, Musharraf cited the rise in terrorist attacks, the creeping power of Pakistan's Supreme Court, and an economic downturn as the reasons for taking such drastic action. "Pakistan is on the verge of destabilization," Musharraf declared. But the reasoning behind Musharraf's imposition of a state of emergency is more likely due to his weakening political situation, not the rise of Islamist militancy in the country.

Musharraf's usurpation has weakened, not strengthened his ability to fight the dramatic rise of the Taliban and al Qaeda in the Northwest Frontier Province, Baluchistan, and elsewhere. National unity and political consensus is needed to fight the rising threat of militancy sweeping across Pakistan, yet the state of emergency has pushed Musharraf's potential political allies into the opposition, weakening support for the fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Militarily, Musharraf has focused his energy on quelling the political opposition, which will detract from his ability to tackle the increasing radicalism. And to is unclear what effect, if any, the state of emergency will have on the sagging morale of the Pakistani military and police, which have performed poorly in the tribal areas of Waziristan and the settled district of Swat. Soldiers have been captured by the hundreds and surrendered or deserted by the dozens. The Taliban has beheaded well over a dozen soldiers and policemen. The Pakistani military also boasts an inordinately high number of Pashtuns in its security forces, many whom are sympathetic to the Islamists. Other Pakistani soldiers resent the thought of fighting what they perceive as an American war against their own citizens....

The declaration of a state of emergency is one of the worst possible moves Musharraf could have made to address the problem of the rise of the Taliban and al Qaeda. He has alienated his potential allies, turned away Benazir Bhutto, and united disparate elements of the opposition. Secular parties and Islamists will now share a single voice in opposition to his blatant disregard for the rule of law, and the emphasis of the Pakistani security forces will shift from combating the Taliban to maintaining order in an increasingly turbulent political environment.

Newsweek recently reported on Pakistan's danger to international security:

Today no other country on earth is arguably more dangerous than Pakistan. It has everything Osama bin Laden could ask for: political instability, a trusted network of radical Islamists, an abundance of angry young anti-Western recruits, secluded training areas, access to state-of-the-art electronic technology, regular air service to the West and security services that don't always do what they're supposed to do. (Unlike in Iraq or Afghanistan, there also aren't thousands of American troops hunting down would-be terrorists.) Then there's the country's large and growing nuclear program. "If you were to look around the world for where Al Qaeda is going to find its bomb, it's right in their backyard," says Bruce Riedel, the former senior director for South Asia on the National Security Council.

The conventional story about Pakistan has been that it is an unstable nuclear power, with distant tribal areas in terrorist hands. What is new, and more frightening, is the extent to which Taliban and Qaeda elements have now turned much of the country, including some cities, into a base that gives jihadists more room to maneuver, both in Pakistan and beyond.

In recent months, as Musharraf has grown more and more unpopular after eight years of rule, Islamists have been emboldened. The homegrown militants who have hidden Al Qaeda's leaders since the end of 2001 are no longer restricted to untamed mountain villages along the border. These Islamist fighters now operate relatively freely in cities like Karachi—a process the U.S. and Pakistani governments call "Talibanization." Hammered by suicide bombers and Iraq-style IEDs and reluctant to make war on its countrymen, Pakistan's demoralized military seems incapable of stopping the jihadists even in the cities. "Until I return to fight, I'll feel safe and relaxed here," Abdul Majadd, a Taliban commander who was badly wounded this summer during a fire fight against British troops in Afghanistan, told NEWSWEEK recently after he was evacuated to Karachi for emergency care.

Pakistan's crisis places a tremendous burden on the United States. As the New York Times notes:

For more than five months the United States has been trying to orchestrate a political transition in Pakistan that would manage to somehow keep Gen. Pervez Musharraf in power without making a mockery of President Bush’s promotion of democracy in the Muslim world.

On Saturday, those carefully laid plans fell apart spectacularly. Now the White House is stuck in wait-and-see mode, with limited options and a lack of clarity about the way forward.

General Musharraf’s move to seize emergency powers and abandon the Constitution left Bush administration officials close to their nightmare: an American-backed military dictator who is risking civil instability in a country with nuclear weapons and an increasingly alienated public.

Mr. Bush entered a delicate dance with Pakistan immediately after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when General Musharraf pledged his cooperation in the fight against Al Qaeda, whose top leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are believed to be hiding out in the mountainous border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The United States has given Pakistan more than $10 billion in aid, mostly to the military, since 2001. Now, if the state of emergency drags on, the administration will be faced with the difficult decision of whether to cut off that aid and risk undermining Pakistan’s efforts to pursue terrorists — a move the White House believes could endanger the security of the United States.

Adm. William J. Fallon, the senior American military commander in the Middle East, told General Musharraf and his top generals in Islamabad on Friday that he would put that aid at risk if he seized emergency powers.

But after the declaration on Saturday, there was no immediate action by the administration to accompany the tough talk, as officials monitored developments in Pakistan. Inside the White House the hope is that the state of emergency will be short-lived and that General Musharraf will fulfill his promise to abandon his post as Army chief of staff and hold elections by Jan. 15.

It's time for Musharraf to step aside. The January 15 elections need to go forward. The United States should use the potential loss of Pakistan's military aid as leverage to restore constitutional government in Islamabad.

Americans Pessimistic on War and the Economy

A new poll from the Washington Post finds Americans deeply pessimistic on Iraq and the economy:

One year out from the 2008 election, Americans are deeply pessimistic and eager for a change in direction from the agenda and priorities of President Bush, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Concern about the economy, the war in Iraq and growing dissatisfaction with the political environment in Washington all contribute to the lowest public assessment of the direction of the country in more than a decade. Just 24 percent think the nation is on the right track, and three-quarters said they want the next president to chart a course that is different than that pursued by Bush.

Overwhelmingly, Democrats want a new direction, but so do three-quarters of independents and even half of Republicans. Sixty percent of all Americans said they feel strongly that such a change is needed after two terms of the Bush presidency.

Dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq remains a primary drag on public opinion, and Americans are increasingly downcast about the state of the economy. More than six in 10 called the war not worth fighting, and nearly two-thirds gave the national economy negative marks. The outlook going forward is also bleak: About seven in 10 see a recession as likely over the next year.

The overall landscape tilts in the direction of the Democrats, but there is evidence in the new poll - matched in conversations with political strategists in both parties and follow-up interviews with survey participants - that the coming battle for the White House is shaping up to be another hard-fought, highly negative and closely decided contest.

Not only that, the battle for Congress will be competitive as well. The poll finds public opinion on Congress at lower levels than that of the Bush administration, at just 28 percent (Congressional Democrats have a 36 percent job approval rating).

I commented on the state of public opinion in a post earlier this week: "Republicans Facing Tough Year in 2008."

It's clear that next year looks to be the best electoral environment for the Democrats in generations. I don't see realigning tendencies in the electorate, however. Voters are uncertain about the future and are looking for change. Still, I would argue that continued success in Iraq will help the GOP (some polls find less pessimism on the war), which is all the more reason for Republicans from the administration on down to develop better public relations regarding our progress.

Neocon Dead-Enders and the Mad Rush to War: Not Again?

Frank Rich, in his column today at the New York Times, pulls off the feat of simultaneously attacking the Bush adminstration, "neocon dead-enders," and Hillary Clinton all in the same essay. The hard-left blogging hordes must be in nirvana:

WHEN President Bush started making noises about World War III, he only confirmed what has been a Democratic article of faith all year: Between now and Election Day he and Dick Cheney, cheered on by the mob of neocon dead-enders, are going to bomb Iran.

But what happens if President Bush does not bomb Iran? That is good news for the world, but potentially terrible news for the Democrats. If we do go to war in Iran, the election will indeed be a referendum on the results, which the Republican Party will own no matter whom it nominates for president. But if we don’t, the Democratic standard-bearer will have to take a clear stand on the defining issue of the race. As we saw once again at Tuesday night’s debate, the front-runner, Hillary Clinton, does not have one.

The reason so many Democrats believe war with Iran is inevitable, of course, is that the administration is so flagrantly rerunning the sales campaign that gave us Iraq. The same old scare tactic — a Middle East Hitler plotting a nuclear holocaust — has been recycled with a fresh arsenal of hyped, loosey-goosey intelligence and outright falsehoods that are sometimes regurgitated without corroboration by the press.

Mr. Bush has gone so far as to accuse Iran of shipping arms to its Sunni antagonists in the Taliban, a stretch Newsweek finally slapped down last week. Back in the reality-based community, it is Mr. Bush who has most conspicuously enabled the Taliban’s resurgence by dropping the ball as it regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Administration policy also opened the door to Iran’s lethal involvement in Iraq. The Iraqi “unity government” that our troops are dying to prop up has more allies in its Shiite counterpart in Tehran than it does in Washington.

Yet 2002 history may not literally repeat itself. Mr. Cheney doesn’t necessarily rule in the post-Rumsfeld second Bush term. There are saner military minds afoot now: the defense secretary Robert Gates, the Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen, the Central Command chief William Fallon. They know that a clean, surgical military strike at Iran could precipitate even more blowback than our “cakewalk” in Iraq. The Economist tallied up the risks of a potential Shock and Awe II this summer: “Iran could fire hundreds of missiles at Israel, attack American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, organize terrorist attacks in the West or choke off tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s oil windpipe.”

Then there’s the really bad news. Much as Iraq distracted America from the war against Al Qaeda, so a strike on Iran could ignite Pakistan, Al Qaeda’s thriving base and the actual central front of the war on terror. As Joe Biden said Tuesday night, if we attack Iran to stop it from obtaining a few kilograms of highly enriched uranium, we risk facilitating the fall of the teetering Musharraf government and the unleashing of Pakistan’s already good-to-go nuclear arsenal on Israel and India.

A full-scale regional war, chaos in the oil market, an overstretched American military pushed past the brink — all to take down a little thug like Ahmadinejad (who isn’t even Iran’s primary leader) and a state, however truculent, whose defense budget is less than 1 percent of America’s? Call me a Pollyanna, but I don’t think even the Bush administration can be this crazy.

Yet there is nonetheless a method to all the mad threats of war coming out of the White House. While the saber- rattling is reckless as foreign policy, it’s a proven winner as election-year Republican campaign strategy. The real point may be less to intimidate Iranians than to frighten Americans. Fear, the only remaining card this administration still knows how to play, may once more give a seemingly spent G.O.P. a crack at the White House in 2008.

Rich doesn't stop there. Here's his point about Hillary Clinton:

In Tuesday’s debate Mrs. Clinton tried to play down her vote for Kyl-Lieberman again by incessantly repeating her belief in “vigorous diplomacy” as well as the same sound bite she used after her Iraq vote five years ago. “I am not in favor of this rush for war,” she said, “but I’m also not in favor of doing nothing.”

Much like her now notorious effort to fudge her stand on Eliot Spitzer’s driver’s license program for illegal immigrants, this is a profile in vacillation. And this time Mrs. Clinton’s straddling stood out as it didn’t in 2002. That’s not because she was the only woman on stage but because she is the only Democratic candidate who has not said a firm no to Bush policy.

That leaves her in a no man’s — or woman’s — land. If Mr. Bush actually does make a strike against Iran, Mrs. Clinton will be the only leading Democrat to have played a cameo role in enabling it. If he doesn’t, she can no longer be arguing in the campaign crunch of fall 2008 that she is against rushing to war, because it would no longer be a rush. Her hand would be forced.

Rich is good at mounting all the leftist antiwar talking points. The difficult truth, for Rich and the peaceniks, is that we're winning in Iraq. The "rush to war" meme just recycles all the old anti-Bush denunciations, while changing the subject. Things are going well in Iraq, and we have al Qaeda on the run. Iranian nuclear weapons capability would not be a positive development Middle East politics, no matter how much the left says otherwise. Of course, any tough talk against our adversaries will be denounced as fear-mongering.

Rich is right about one thing, though: The Clinton campaign needs to get a compelling theme. Denunciations of the war aren't going to cut it heading into November 2008, when the consolidation of Iraq's democracy will be further along.

For more commentary check Memeorandum.

Weekend Interview with Natan Sharansky

Natan Sharansky, the Israeli Zionist and former Soviet dissident, comes about as close as possible to living a life of neoconservativism.

Sharansky's the subject of this weekend's Wall Street Journal interview. A main theme of the interview is that democracy promotion, especially as that practiced by the Bush administration, is on the ropes. Sharansky, as the author of The Case for Democracy, has been a major influence on the adminstration's agenda.

Here's a key excerpt from the article:

But democracy is a dirty word these days. So Mr. Sharansky is lonely too, bounced out of Israeli politics and out of favor. He, Vaclav Havel and other former Eastern European dissident faces of the freedom agenda are dismissed as Cold War naïfs, pernicious Utopians, or worse--men whose moral Manichaeism has no business in the "complex Middle East."

America is back to its realist ways in the region, propping up Egyptian and Saudi gerontocrats. The day I visit Mr. Sharansky, Condi Rice is here to prod all sides to another Middle East peace conference, with no mention of political opening as part of the bargain.

Across town at the Shalem Center, his new professional home in Jerusalem's German Colony, Mr. Sharansky puts a brave face on this latest turn in his life. Nine years in a Siberian prison camp without seeing his young wife, he says, puts everything that follows in healthy perspective. His smiling eyes are framed by a recognizable bald pate and graying sideburns (he's almost 60). An anecdote or joke is never absent for long in conversation. As almost any East European will tell you, humor makes unpleasant reality go down easier.

Mr. Sharansky says of his adversaries among the Western intellectual elite: "Those people who are always wrong--they were wrong about the Soviet Union, they were wrong about Oslo [the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace deal], they were wrong about appeasing Yasser Arafat--they are the intellectual leaders of these battles. So what can I tell you?"

But his side is today on a back foot. The war in Iraq and the rise of Hamas in the Palestinian territories, aided by the ballot box, are Exhibits A and B in the case against the Bush Doctrine and its contention that democracy can put down roots in Arab soil.
Mr. Sharansky considers these cases immaterial. "What's happening today in Iraq has nothing to do with the question whether promoting democracy is a good idea, or whether people in Iraq want to live in freedom." The Iraqis' refusal to defend Saddam Hussein and courage in voting for a new constitution and parliament settled that argument for Mr. Sharansky. Iraq's Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites are, he says, engaged in a different, no less ferocious struggle over "identity"--his current obsession, and the subject of his next book.

The victory of Hamas in last year's Palestinian elections is widely considered a defeat for the Bush Doctrine. Mr. Sharansky recalls seeing friends at the White House the day of the vote. "They said, 'Oh, it's the first time, it's a good experiment.' And I said, 'I fully disagree. It's a terrible experiment!' Now of course they come back and say, 'You see, you want to promote democracy and you get Hamas.'"

As he argued in his bestselling book, the West confuses the ballot box with democracy. "The election has to be at the end of the process of building free society," he says. "If there is no free and democratic society, elections can never be free and democratic."

Having not even attempted a "bottom up" overhaul of its politics and economy, the Palestinians weren't ready for a poll, he says, nor were other post-Cold War Western protectorates. He faults successive U.S. administrations for pushing votes before their time in Bosnia right after its war ended in 1995, Iraq and in the Palestinian territories. "Nobody thought in 1946 to have elections in Germany and Japan."

I think the neoconservative vision for Iraq will be vindicated ultimately (sooner rather than later, the way things are looking). History shows that the spread of freedom is generally welcomed. The controversy starts when that vision is backed by military power.

I noticed that Sharansky was spared a thrashing by the left blogosphere, as indicated by the dearth of blog posts at Sharansky's Memeorandum link. Perhaps he's old news, or perhaps the lefties don't have a clue on Sharansky's neoconservative significance. Considering his impact on President Bush (here and here), that would be a surprise.

Neo-Neocon 's on top of it, in any case.