NeoConNews

The Neoconservative Convergence

2005-07-21T21:31:00.000-07:00

Charles Krauthammer:
In place of realism or liberal internationalism, the past 4 1/2 years have seen an unashamed assertion and deployment of American power, a resort to unilateralism when necessary, and a willingness to pre-empt threats before they emerge. Most importantly, the second Bush administration has explicitly declared the spread of freedom to be the central principle of American foreign policy. George W. Bush's second inaugural address in January was the most dramatic and expansive expression of this principle. A few weeks later, at the National Defense University, the president offered its most succinct formulation: "The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom."

The remarkable fact that the Bush doctrine is, essentially, a synonym for neoconservative foreign policy marks neoconservatism's own transition from a position of dissidence, which it occupied during the first Bush administration and the Clinton years, to governance. Neoconservative foreign policy, one might say, has reached maturity. That is not only a portentous development, requiring some rethinking of principles and practice, but a rather unexpected one.

It is unexpected because, only a year ago, neoconservative foreign policy was being consigned to the ash heap of history. In the spring and summer of 2004, in the midst of increasing difficulties in Iraq, it was very widely believed that neoconservative policies had been run to the ground, that the administration that had purveyed them would soon be thrown out of office, and that internecine recriminations were about to begin over who lost the war on terror, the war in Iraq and indeed the reins of American foreign policy.

John Howard's response to a press question about Iraq

2005-07-21T19:24:00.000-07:00

Instapundit.

PRIME MIN. HOWARD: Could I start by saying the prime minister and I were having a discussion when we heard about it. My first reaction was to get some more information. And I really don't want to add to what the prime minister has said. It's a matter for the police and a matter for the British authorities to talk in detail about what has happened here.

Can I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government and indeed the policies of the British and American governments on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it's given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.

Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq.

And I remind you that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq.

Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor. Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn't have done that?

When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on the 7th of July, they talked about British policy not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn't be in Afghanistan?

When Sergio de Mello was murdered in Iraq -- a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, a person immensely respected for his work in the United Nations -- when al Qaeda gloated about that, they referred specifically to the role that de Mello had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations administrator in East Timor.

Now I don't know the mind of the terrorists. By definition, you can't put yourself in the mind of a successful suicide bomber. I can only look at objective facts, and the objective facts are as I've cited. The objective evidence is that Australia was a terrorist target long before the operation in Iraq. And indeed, all the evidence, as distinct from the suppositions, suggests to me that this is about hatred of a way of life, this is about the perverted use of principles of the great world religion that, at its root, preaches peace and cooperation. And I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder.

PRIME MIN. BLAIR: And I agree 100 percent with that. (Laughter.)

John Howard and Max Boot on Appeasement

2005-07-15T21:29:00.000-07:00

Max Boot:
Even in January 1942, when German armies were at the gates of Moscow, George Orwell wrote in Partisan Review that "the greater part of the very young intelligentsia are anti-war … don't believe in any 'defense of democracy,' are inclined to prefer Germany to Britain, and don't feel the horror of Fascism that we who are somewhat older feel."

As if to illustrate Orwell's point, a pacifist poet named D.S. Savage wrote a reply in which he explained why he "would never fight and kill for such a phantasm" as "Britain's 'democracy.' " Savage saw no difference between Britain and its enemies because under the demands of war both were imposing totalitarianism: "Germans call it National Socialism. We call it democracy. The result is the same."

Savage naively wondered, "Who is to say that a British victory will be less disastrous than a German one?" Savage thought the real problem was that Britain had lost "her meaning, her soul," but "the unloading of a billion tons of bombs on Germany won't help this forward an inch." "Personally," he added, with hilarious understatement, "I do not care for Hitler." But he thought the way to resist Hitler was by not resisting him: "Whereas the rest of the nation is content with calling down obloquy on Hitler's head, we regard this as superficial. Hitler requires, not condemnation, but understanding."

BBC Editorial Guidelines:
The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term, without attribution.

From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

MAXINE McKEW: Prime Minister, if as you say you can't rule out that possibility that we could have potential bombers right here in Australia, what if today's announcement, this redeployment to Afghanistan and our continued presence in Iraq is all the provocation they need?

JOHN HOWARD: Maxine, these people are opposed to what we believe in and what we stand for, far more than what we do. If you imagine that you can buy immunity from fanatics by curling yourself in a ball, apologising for the world - to the world - for who you are and what you stand for and what you believe in, not only is that morally bankrupt, but it's also ineffective. Because fanatics despise a lot of things and the things they despise most is weakness and timidity. There has been plenty of evidence through history that fanatics attack weakness and retreating people even more savagely than they do defiant people.

Gay or Female, Uncle Sam Should Want You

2005-05-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

Max Boot:
At a time when the Army and Marine Corps are struggling to fill their ranks, many conservatives are determined to limit the ability of women and gays to contribute to the war effort. Are they more concerned with winning culture wars at home or winning the war on terrorism abroad?

The issue of women in combat has arisen again because the Army wants to assign mixed-sex support units to work with combat battalions. Almost all jobs in the military already are open to women. They're allowed to serve as fighter pilots and medics, truck drivers and police officers. But Pentagon policy keeps them out of ground-combat battalions and some attendant support units. Anti-feminist activist Elaine Donnelly charges that "politically correct group-thinkers and Clinton-promoted generals in the Pentagon" are conspiring to traduce this policy.

To block this nefarious plot (actually hatched by Rumsfeld-promoted generals), some House Republicans introduced legislation to prevent the Pentagon from opening any more jobs to women and to reassign 22,000 women already serving in forward-support companies. Opposition from the Army, which wants the flexibility to assign personnel as needed, killed this measure. Ranking minority member Ike Skelton rightly called the bill a "solution in search of a problem."

The role of women has been steadily expanding since — no coincidence — the end of the draft in 1973. An all-volunteer military can't afford to ignore half of the population. The integration process was not always smooth, as scandals like Tailhook attest. But today, 212,000 women (15% of the active-duty force) play an integral role in the military. Keeping them out of combat is impossible, whatever the law says, because in a place like Iraq everyone is on the front lines. Thirty-five female soldiers have died in Iraq and almost 300 have been wounded.

Dissing the Koran

2005-05-25T11:56:00.000-07:00

The Weekly Standard:
While Islamist fanatics and ignorant Westerners sow panic over the alleged desecration of a Koran at Guantanamo Bay, no one mentions a startling fact: When it comes to destruction of the Koran, there's no question who the world champion is--the government of Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi state religion is the primitive and austere Wahhabi version of Islam, which defines many traditional Islamic practices as idolatrous. Notably, the state bans the importation of Korans published elsewhere. When foreign pilgrims arrive at the Saudi border by the millions for the annual journey to Mecca, what happens to the non-Saudi Korans they are carrying? The border guards confiscate them, to be shredded, pulped, or burned. Beautiful bindings and fine paper are viewed as a particular provocation--all are destroyed. (This on top of the spiritual vandalism the Saudis perpetrate, by inserting anti-Jewish and anti-Christian squibs into the Korans they publish in foreign languages, as Stephen Schwartz documented in our issue of September 27, 2004.)

This behavior isn't a recent innovation, by the way. Here's an account of how the Saudis carried on when they seized the city of Taif in 1802. It's taken from an unimpeachable Islamic source, the compilation Advice for the Muslim, edited by the Turkish scholar Hilmi Isik and published by Hakikat Kitabevi in Istanbul:

The Wahhabis tore up the copies of the Koran . . . and other Islamic books they took from libraries, mosques and houses, and threw them down on the ground. They made sandals from the gold-gilded leather covers
of the Koran and other books and wore them on their filthy feet. There were verses of the Koran and other sacred writings on those leather covers. The pages of those valuable books thrown around were so numerous that there was no space to step in the streets of Taif. . . . The Wahhabi bandits, who were gathered from the deserts for looting and who did not know the Koran, tore up all the copies they found and stamped on them. Only three copies of the Koran were saved from the plunder of a major town, Taif.

Arabs in Foreign Lands

2005-05-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

From Foreign Policy:
People of Arab descent living in the United States are doing far better than the average American. That is the surprising conclusion drawn from data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2000 and released last March. The census found that U.S. residents who report having Arab ancestors are better educated and wealthier than average Americans.

Whereas 24 percent of Americans hold college degrees, 41 percent of Arab Americans are college graduates. The median income for an Arab family living in the United States is $52,300—4.6 percent higher than other American families—and more than half of all Arab Americans own their home. Forty-two percent of people of Arab descent in the United States work as managers or professionals, while the same is true for only 34 percent of the general U.S. population. For many, this success has come on quickly: Although about 50 percent of Arab Americans were born in the United States, nearly half of those born abroad did not arrive until the 1990s.
...

In general, Muslims living in Europe—of which Arabs constitute a significant proportion—are poorer, less educated, and in worse health than the rest of the population. In the Netherlands, the unemployment rate for ethnic Moroccans is 22 percent, roughly four times the rate for the country as a whole. In Britain, the Muslim population has the highest unemployment rate of all religious groups. The failure of Arabs in Europe is particularly worrisome given that 10 of the states or entities along Europe’s eastern and southern borders are home to nearly 250 million Muslims—most of them Arabs—with a birthrate more than double that of Europeans.

This census data should prompt soul-searching in many quarters. Cultural determinists may want to revise their theories of Arab backwardness. Arab leaders should be ashamed when they see their emigrants prospering in the United States while their own people are miserable. And Europe should wake up to the possibility that it may have less of an “Arab problem” than a “European problem.” Then again, maybe the cultural determinists have an explanation for why Europeans are so predisposed against Arab success.

Krauthammer vs Fukuyama

2005-05-16T21:47:00.000-07:00

THE KRAUTHAMMER ZINGER [John Podhoretz]

At a speech tonight in New York -- okay, it was the first annual Norman Podhoretz Lecture, delivered at a dinner hosted by Commentary Magazine -- Charles Krauthammer gave a characteristically brilliant disquisition on "neoconservatism as a governing philosophy." But he earned his biggest laughs and biggest applause when he took on an obnoxious essay by Francis Fukuyama published last year in the National Interest.

Fukuyama, Krauthammer said, said the Bush democratization project was a bad idea and had always been a bad idea and everybody who supported it and led it should have known it was a bad idea -- even though in the year before the war Fukuyama was utterly silent about it.

Krauthammer called the Fukuyama article "retrospective prophecy," and noted that in the aftermath of the Iraqi elections it had already been proved wrong. "Maybe," he mused, quoting Fukuyama's own highbrow soundbite back at him, "that's what happens at the end of history."

Yee-ouch. Talk about being hoist on your own petard. Game, set, and match to Krauthammer.

Kuwaiti women win right to vote

2005-05-16T20:32:00.000-07:00

BBC:
The Kuwaiti parliament has voted to give women full political rights.

The amendment to the Kuwait's electoral law means women can for the first time vote and stand in parliamentary and local elections.

It was passed by 35 votes for, 23 against, with one abstention. Council elections are due this year.

The result, announced by the speaker of parliament, was greeted with thunderous applause from the public gallery where backers of the amendment were gathered.

"I congratulate the women of Kuwait for having achieved their political rights," said Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah.

An Electoral Trifecta

2005-05-08T09:21:00.000-07:00

William Kristol:
So it turns out Madrid was the exception, not the rule. On March 14, 2004, the party of Spanish prime minister José María Aznar was defeated at the polls after an al Qaeda attack in Madrid and after a campaign in which the opposition fiercely criticized Aznar for Spain's involvement in the war to remove Saddam Hussein. In the wake of its electoral victory, the new leftist government withdrew Spain's troops from Iraq.

The question, a year ago, was this: Was Spain a harbinger of electoral defeat for the other democratic leaders of the war to liberate Iraq? Some hoped it would be, and have been severely disappointed. President Bush did not flinch in Iraq and was reelected with a stronger showing than four years before. Australia's John Howard, a steadfast supporter of the war in Iraq, was reelected to a historic fourth term as prime minister with an increased majority. And last week Britain's Tony Blair won a third term, the first Labour prime minister ever to do so.

Blair won with a diminished majority, to be sure. Yet the main opposition party, the Tories, supported the war as well. So roughly 68 percent of the British electorate voted for parties with pro-war leaders. The Liberal Democrats, critics of the war who pledged a quick withdrawal from Iraq, did increase their vote by about 4 percentage points, but still received only 22 percent of the vote.

The electorates of the major democracies--at least the English-speaking ones--have thus shown a willingness to support the leaders who took them to war. This despite the fact that no operational weapons of mass destruction were found, and despite the difficulties of the last couple of years in Iraq. In the cases of Howard and Bush, the victories were particularly impressive since they preceded the remarkable January 30 elections in Iraq and subsequent positive political developments there and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Is Blair a Liar? Brits Don't Care

2005-05-05T08:56:00.000-07:00

Max Boot:
How can you tell if a political party is brain-dead? Easy. It spends an entire campaign denouncing the incumbent as a smarmy, good-for-nothing liar, rather than outlining its own agenda. The Republicans tried it against Bill Clinton in 1996, the Democrats tried it against George W. Bush in 2004, and now in Britain the Conservatives are trying it, with equal lack of success, against Tony Blair.

Such a tactic is beguiling because, to True Believers, the other side's triumphs are never on the up and up; they must be the result of hoodwinking the hapless electorate. The problem with this approach was pointed out to me by a political strategist last week: "Voters think all politicians are liars. So telling them that someone is a particularly effective liar doesn't work."

It especially doesn't work for the Tories because they're accusing Prime Minister Blair of duplicity on an issue about which they actually agree with him. Conservative leader Michael Howard says he would have supported the invasion of Iraq even without weapons of mass destruction — the subject of Blair's supposed dissembling. By nevertheless making the L-word the centerpiece of today's election, Howard comes off as opportunistic and unprincipled.

The Corner: Max Boot Gets it Wrong

Perhaps the neocons got it right in the Middle East

2005-05-05T08:40:00.000-07:00

LGF: I hope you’re sitting down, because today the Guardian’s Max Hastings dares to voice the left’s ultimate heresy: Perhaps the neocons got it right in the Middle East.

The greatest danger for those of us who dislike George Bush is that our instincts may tip over into a desire to see his foreign policy objectives fail. No reasonable person can oppose the president’s commitment to Islamic democracy. Most western Bushophobes are motivated not by dissent about objectives, but by a belief that the Washington neocons’ methods are crass, and more likely to escalate a confrontation between the west and Islam than to defuse it.

Such scepticism, however, should not prevent us from stepping back to reassess the progress of the Bush project, and satisfy ourselves that mere prejudice is not blinding us to the possibility that western liberals are wrong; that the Republicans’ grand strategy is getting somewhere.

Thatcher's Seventh Victory?

2005-05-05T00:30:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan:
THATCHER'S SEVENTH VICTORY? That's one view of the Brit election tomorrow:

Assuming Labour wins, it will be the seventh victory in a row for Margaret Thatcher. It will deliver her a round 30 years of supremacy over British government, equalling the epoch of Attlee’s welfare socialism after 1945. Labour’s manifesto is a Thatcherite classic: adventurism abroad and progressive privatisation at home, moral partiality bolted on to an ever-expanding nanny State. The consensus is well illustrated in the near-identical proposals for public services from Labour and Conservatives. Both have pandered to middle-class insecurity. They have used fear, crime, discipline and control as leitmotifs and promised to curb civil liberty and make the welfare state increasingly optional. Baroness Thatcher may have disappeared to Venice for the duration, but she can look back on this campaign with pride. She destroyed the Social Democrats, she destroyed old Labour and, in stimulating the creation of new Labour, she has all but destroyed the Tories.

The key test of political longevity is whether your political opponents eventually adopt your new consensus. The only flaw in this reasoning is that Simon Jenkins misses the premiership of John Major. If the Tories had not won their post-Thatcher victory, Blair would never have emerged to save Labour. It was Major who reconciled the country to Thatcherism - by winning an election as a Tory who was not Thatcher. For what it's worth: I'd vote Tory this time. Blair will win anyway. But his creeping expansion of the welfare state must be resisted and reversed. Another Labour victory might just convince the Tories to go back to advocating much lower taxation, a smaller state and far more decentralization. Here's hoping.

The Michael Moore Conservatives

2005-05-04T17:07:00.000-07:00

The Weekly Standard on Britain's anti-American Tories:
There are many things that can be said against Michael Moore. An odd combination of Howard Stern and Paul Krugman, Moore is the king of all left-wing media, from films to books, who specializes in trashing everything that conservative America holds dear. For Moore, businessmen are always trampling on the faces of the poor, Republicans are always the tools of sinister vested interests, and America is always up to no good in the world. But say this for the pudgy auteur, he has his uses as a timesaver at dinner parties in hyper-partisan America. If the woman next to you admires Moore, she probably dated Dean and is now firmly married to Kerry; if she regards Moore as a bilious blowhard, then she is probably going to vote for George W. Bush.

Things are a bit more complicated in my native England. Take, for instance, a lunch at a famous Conservative haunt in London's clubland in the tense weeks before the invasion of Iraq. As a visitor from Washington, D.C., I would normally have expected a few warm inquiries about the health of Britain's closest ally; instead, I was subjected to a vigorous inquisition from the assembled Tories.

A retired Foreign Office panjandrum denounced the Bush administration for its crass ignorance of the Arab world. A curmudgeonly barrister proclaimed his intention to march for peace. A senior banker complained that he can't visit New York these days without being shocked by the money-grubbing vulgarity of the place. The only person present who didn't regard George W. Bush as a warmongering simpleton was an American émigré who had worked for Richard Perle in the Pentagon back in the 1980s.

This was my first introduction to the world of Britain's Michael Moore conservatives. Think of all the baggage that one finds in Moore's ideological duffel bag--from his first film, the anti-GM attack Roger & Me, through his denunciation of the "thief in chief" in the bestselling Stupid White Men, through last week's standing ovation at the Cannes film festival for his latest conspiratorial anti-Bush film, Fahrenheit 9/11. There is the belief that American politics is shaped by evil special interests (oil barons, neoconservatives, evangelicals); a preference for "sophisticated" European policies over "simpleminded" American ones; and, above all, a loathing for George W. Bush. All of these views are commonly voiced in the most impeccably conservative circles in London. This is not to say that every true blue cloakroom has a stock of Moore's books, though some do, particularly in houses with children at university (he has sold a million copies in Britain); it is more that British Tories have come independently to exactly the same views as Moore.

Burchill on Thatcher

2005-05-02T16:35:00.000-07:00

Chicago Boyz:
I have always loved Julie Burchill. There is nothing remotely like her mix of sentimental Bolshevism, working class cultural nostalgia, British patriotism and militarism, Judaeophilia, loathing of Germany and (usually) America, detestation of the British upper classes, personal libertinism combined with a hardnosed understanding of the consequences of such behavior, and her devotion to sixties-era British hipness and seventies punk rock. She is often wildly wrong, but always entertaining.

This recent piece on the upcoming UK election is nicely done. Ms. Burchill offers this beautiful passage about the impact of Margaret Thatcher, whom she depicts as a one-woman whirlwind of pent-up creative destruction:

[A]s some smart-aleck said, we must change or perish. And who should break our long postwar consensual slumber — not with a snog but with a short sharp smack around the head with a handbag and a cry of “Look smart!” — but the Iron Lady herself.

Mrs Thatcher meant, and still means, many things — some of which she is not yet aware of herself, as we are not. Only death brings proper perspective to the triumphs and failures of a political career; it is only with the blank look and full stop of death that that old truism “all political careers end in failure” stops being true. Only a terminally smug liberal would still write her off as an uptight bundle of Little Englandisms, seeking to preserve the old order, however hard she worked that look at first; voting for her was something akin to buying what one thought was a Vera Lynn record, getting it home and finding a Sex Pistols single inside.

She was just as much about revolution as reaction, and part of any revolution is destruction. Some of the things she destroyed seemed like a shame at the time, such as the old industries — though on balance, isn’t there anything good about the fact that thousands of young men who once simply because of who their fathers were would have been condemned to a life spent underground in the darkness, and an early death coughing up bits of lung, now won’t be? It’s interesting to note that while some middle and even upper-class people choose to go into “low” jobs — journalist, actor, sportsman, plumber — which pay well and/or are a good laugh, no one ever went out of their way to become a miner. “Dogs are bred to retrieve birds and Welshman to go down mines,” said some vile old-school Tory; not any more they’re not, thanks to Mrs T.

Her appetite for destruction was more often than not spot-on. Mrs Thatcher was hated by the old Tory establishment because she, more than any Labour leader, brought down the culture of deference, of knowing one’s place. This led to the very British cultural social comedy of left-wing poshos such as the Foots being outraged by the upstart, while outsiders who should on paper have been Labour voters recognised her as one of them.

One of my younger friends, a very angry, talented, Anglo-Punjabi man of profoundly working-class origin, remembers as a child crying inconsolably for days when Mrs Thatcher was unseated by her own party. It says it all that the Queen far preferred the company of the Labour Prime Ministers Wilson and Callaghan than she did the Conservative Thatcher; the Queen could smell the lack of respect on Mrs T, and it put her back up no end.

"I punched Saddam in the mouth."

2005-04-26T21:07:00.000-07:00

From LGF:
In a south-city Saint Louis Bread Co., a young auto mechanic named Samir puts down his coffee long enough to carefully eye the other patrons. Assured no one is paying him any mind, he lowers his voice to a guttural whisper, fidgets with the zipper on his black tracksuit and rubs his grease-stained fingers along a finely manicured goatee. Then, in a syncopated rhythm of street slang and accented English, he transports himself back in time to a bitter-cold December night in Iraq. It had to have been the most sublime moment of his life. Samir tells how he arrived in Tikrit as an Arabic interpreter for United States Special Forces in late 2003, how he peered into a hidden bunker and heard a voice begging for mercy, how he reached into the darkness and pulled out Saddam Hussein.

"I was so angry," says Samir, who immigrated to St. Louis eleven years ago after fleeing Iraq. "I began cussing at him, calling him a motherfucker, a son-of-a-bitch — you name it. I told him I was Shiite from the south and was part of the revolution against him in 1991. I said he murdered my uncles and cousins. He imprisoned my father.

"All these years of anger, I couldn’t stop. I tried to say the worst things I could. I told him if he were a real man he would have killed himself. I asked him: ‘Why are you living in that dirty little hole, you bastard? You are a rat. Your father is a rat.’“

In Arabic, Saddam told Samir to shut up. And when Saddam called him a traitor, an enraged Samir silenced his prisoner with a flurry of quick jabs to the face.

"I punched Saddam in the mouth."

Rebuilding the party of Lincoln

2005-04-23T16:01:00.000-07:00

The Economist:

The Republicans are suddenly mentioning Abraham Lincoln a lot. In his second inaugural address Mr Bush quoted Lincoln on the evils of slavery and compared the struggle for democracy in the Middle East with America's own struggle for a “union based on liberty”. A bust of the great man sits in the Oval Office. Condoleezza Rice mentioned both Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, a former slave who became a stalwart Republican, when she took the oath of office as Mr Bush's second black secretary of state. There is even a “2005 Republican freedom calendar”, replete with references to the party's contributions to civil rights (for instance, Martin Luther King voted for Eisenhower in 1956).

Mr Bush has made a point of inviting leading black figures, particularly religious leaders, to the White House. He has nominated his wife to run a new $150m programme to battle gangs. Ken Mehlman, the Republicans' new chairman, is also on a charm offensive, meeting black leaders and fine-tuning the party's message machine. As with last year's presidential election, the idea is to circumvent both the much loathed “liberal Washington media establishment” and the Democratic civil-rights establishment, and talk directly to black communities about things like Social Security reform.

Why on earth are the Republicans devoting so much effort to a group that is losing its place as America's largest minority to Latinos? Part of the reason is simple arithmetic. The Republicans will dramatically improve their electoral chances—particularly in the mid-west—if they can eat into the Democratic Party's most loyal constituency. By increasing his share of the black vote in Ohio from 9% in 2000 to 16% in 2004, for example, Mr Bush may have boosted his margin of victory by as much as 50,000 votes.

But an even more important reason lies with morality. For the past 40 years the Democratic Party's identification with black causes has given it a virtuous sheen with plenty of moderate voters of all colours (by contrast, Nixon's southern strategy is something many non-southern Republicans would rather not talk about in public). Loosen the Democrat grip on the black vote and this sheen fades; and that, in turn, makes all sorts of things possible, from further inroads into the white vote (white women are a particular target) to a more sympathetic consideration for Republican market-based solutions to urban problems.

Big GOP Opportunities

2005-04-15T13:41:00.000-07:00

John Fund:
In 2000, Mr. Bush carried 228 congressional districts to Al Gore's 207 on his way to one of the closest victories in American history. This year Mr. Bush carried 255 congressional districts, nearly six in 10. The number of "turnover" districts--those voting for a House member of one party and a presidential candidate of the other--continues to shrink, mostly due to the growth of straight-ticket voting and gerrymandering. There were only 59 such districts in 2004, compared with 86 in 2000 and 110 when Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole in 1996.

The best chances for Democrats to gain the 15 seats they need to take control of the House in 2006 are in these districts held by "Kerry Republicans." The problem is that there are so few of them. John Kerry carried just 18 GOP House members' districts, while Mr. Bush carried 41 Democratic ones.

Only five Republican House members currently sit in districts where Mr. Bush won less than 47% of the presidential vote last year: two in Connecticut, two in Iowa and one in Delaware. But 31 House Democrats represent districts where John Kerry won less than 47%. That means Republicans have many more opportunities to pick up seats in favorable political terrain as Democratic members leave the House.

Willisms:
Republican-leaning areas of the country, generally, are growing, sometimes explosively. Democrat-leaning areas of the country, generally, are losing population (or, at least, stagnating).

The British Election:

2005-04-13T03:58:00.000-07:00

Ramesh Ponnuru on John O'Sullivan's coverage of the upcoming elections:
These paragraphs seemed to me to be worth highlighting: "It is widely believed in Washington that the Tories are weak on Iraq. Here is what the Tory manifesto says on the topic: 'If a Conservative Government ever has to take the country to war, we will tell the British people why. Mr Blair misrepresented intelligence to make the case for war in Iraq, and failed to plan for the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's downfall. It is nevertheless the case that a democratic Iraq would be a powerful beacon of hope in a troubled part of the world. So we believe that Britain must remain committed to rebuilding Iraq and allowing democracy to take hold.'

"A little more measured and less passionate than Tony Blair's personal position — though a great deal more satisfactory than that of most Labor ministers and MPs — but firmly on the American side. On the longer-term and more vital question of the common European foreign and defense policy, moreover, the Tories are somewhat closer than Blair to the U.S. They would oppose the European constitution which imposes a common foreign policy and they believe that European cooperation in defense should occur only within the framework of NATO — a commitment on which Blair is very slippery.

"American conservatives and neoconservatives who pine for a Blair victory should consider two points. First, Blair is a personal phenomenon with a short remaining shelf-life. Within a few years he will be replaced by a leader, probably Gordon Brown, who is more reflective of his party. And, second, that a Labor victory even under Blair would entrench the European integration in defense and foreign policy that might deprive the U.S. of British (and Italian, and East European, and Baltic) support in some future Iraq crisis."

Sandy Rolls Over for Bill & Hill

2005-04-06T18:53:00.000-07:00

Dick Morris:
Berger has admitted that he stuffed top-secret documents into his pockets, shirt and pants, and why he sliced some up with scissors, destroyed them and then lied about it. Until he gives a credible explanation for this behavior, we are all entitled to make the logical inference — that he was hiding something to protect himself and his old bosses. . . .

Berger would also have us believe he "inadvertently" cut up and "inadvertently" destroyed the documents — that he had no intention of concealing anything from the commission. And then, I suppose, he inadvertently lied about what he'd done.

Come on. With a shabby explanation like that, Berger invites speculation that he is covering for himself or for the Clintons.

Back in the '90s, I found Berger consistently unwilling to act vigorously against terror-sponsoring nations. When Sen. Al D'Amato proposed sanctions against Iran, Berger tried to get Clinton to veto the bill; it was only after much public pressure that he signed it.

Berger was on a fast track to be the next Democratic Secretary of State. He risked that in stealing those documents. Now he has destroyed his future career by pleading to a criminal misdemeanor — admitting what he did while still concealing why he did it.

Opinion Journal: The Justice Department shows admirable restraint.
It's worth noting that Mr. Berger will still have to explain his actions to a judge at sentencing--a judge who could reject Justice's recommendation and give him to up a year in jail. We hope the judge does insist on a full explanation of motive. Lesser officials have received harsher penalties for more minor transgressions, so a complete airing of the facts will show the public that justice is being done. But given the minimal damage from the crime, this looks to be a case where prosecutors have shown some commendable restraint against a high-powered political figure.

Berger Will Plead Guilty To Taking Classified Paper

2005-04-01T18:32:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post:
Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, a former White House national security adviser, plans to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, and will acknowledge intentionally removing and destroying copies of a classified document about the Clinton administration's record on terrorism.

Berger's plea agreement, which was described yesterday by his advisers and was confirmed by Justice Department officials, will have one of former president Bill Clinton's most influential advisers and one of the Democratic Party's leading foreign policy advisers in a federal court this afternoon.

The deal's terms make clear that Berger spoke falsely last summer in public claims that in 2003 he twice inadvertently walked off with copies of a classified document during visits to the National Archives, then later lost them.

He described the episode last summer as "an honest mistake." Yesterday, a Berger associate who declined to be identified by name but was speaking with Berger's permission said: "He recognizes what he did was wrong. . . . It was not inadvertent."

Under terms negotiated by Berger's attorneys and the Justice Department, he has agreed to pay a $10,000 fine and accept a three-year suspension of his national security clearance. These terms must be accepted by a judge before they are final, but Berger's associates said yesterday he believes that closure is near on what has been an embarrassing episode during which he repeatedly misled people about what happened during two visits to the National Archives in September and October 2003.

Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff

2005-03-22T19:00:00.000-08:00

From Instapundit:
GOP OVERREACH ALERT: In their book The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge explain how the Republican coalition could go wrong: “Too Southern, too greedy, and too contradictory.”

David Brooks thinks they've hit the "too greedy" part already:

Back in 1995, when Republicans took over Congress, a new cadre of daring and original thinkers arose. These bold innovators had a key insight: that you no longer had to choose between being an activist and a lobbyist. You could be both. You could harness the power of K Street to promote the goals of Goldwater, Reagan and Gingrich. And best of all, you could get rich while doing it!

Before long, ringleader Grover Norquist and his buddies were signing lobbying deals with the Seychelles and the Northern Mariana Islands and talking up their interests at weekly conservative strategy sessions - what could be more vital to the future of freedom than the commercial interests of these two fine locales?

Before long, folks like Norquist and Abramoff were talking up the virtues of international sons of liberty like Angola's Jonas Savimbi and Congo's dictator Mobutu Sese Seko - all while receiving compensation from these upstanding gentlemen, according to The Legal Times. Only a reactionary could have been so discomfited by Savimbi's little cannibalism problem as to think this was not a daring contribution to the cause of Reaganism.

Ouch. Makes those neocons look good, though, doesn't it?

Update:
A Lobbyist's Progress: Jack Abramoff and the end of the Republican Revolution.

Joe Lieberman: "some of my best friends are neocons."

2005-03-17T20:40:00.000-08:00

The New Yorker:
Lieberman is a study in the dangers of steroidal muscularity, becoming an outlier in his own party. (He has edged to the right as his running mate in the 2000 election, Al Gore, has moved leftward.) His fate was sealed with a kiss, planted on his cheek by Bush, just after the President delivered his State of the Union address. "That may have been the last straw for some of the people in Connecticut, the blogger types," Lieberman told me. But he is unapologetic about his defense of Bush's Iraq policy, saying, "Bottom line, I think Bush has it right." When I asked if he was becoming a neoconservative, Lieberman smiled and said, "No, but some of my best friends are neocons."

Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank

2005-03-17T04:31:00.000-08:00

The New York Times:
President Bush said today that he would nominate Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense and one of the chief architects of the invasion of Iraq two years ago, to become president of the World Bank.

The announcement, coming on the heels of the appointment of John R. Bolton as the new American ambassador to the United Nations, was greeted with quiet anguish in those foreign capitals where the Iraq conflict and its aftermath remain deeply unpopular, and where Mr. Wolfowitz’s drive to spread democracy around the world has been viewed with some suspicion.

...

Despite the displeasure of some diplomats who had hoped that the administration would appoint a person without the almost radioactive reputation of a committed ideologue, they said that they expected Mr. Wolfowitz to receive the approval of the World Bank’s board of directors in time for Mr. Wolfensohn’s departure in May.

Back in their pomp

2005-03-16T20:31:00.000-08:00

The Economist:
Bill Kristol tells a nice story about a chance encounter in a shopping mall. Mr Kristol is a neo-conservative prince, the son of one of the movement's founders, and a ubiquitous talking head on Fox News. But even neo-conservative princes have to go shopping. One weekend found him wandering the glitzy corridors of Tyson's Corner, in northern Virginia. A young man accosted him and confessed that he, too, was a neo-conservative. He then paused for a moment before adding that he wasn't quite sure what neo-conservatism was.

This is not an isolated example of enthusiasm for the creed. The neo-conservatives are back in their pomp after a dismal year. The essence of neo-conservative foreign policy (to clear up the young man's confusion) is a mixture of hawkishness and idealism: hawkishness on projecting American power abroad, but idealism when it comes to using that power to spread good things like freedom and democracy. The neo-cons have no doubt that their vision has been vindicated by recent events in the Middle East. Would democracy be stirring in the region if Mr Bush hadn't chosen to topple the Taliban and Saddam Hussein? “Three cheers for the Bush doctrine”, says Charles Krauthammer, a leading neo-con journalist, in Time magazine; “Neo-cons may get the last laugh”, says Max Boot in the Los Angeles Times; “Let us now praise Paul Wolfowitz”, adds David Brooks in the New York Times.

Many of the fiercest critics of “neo-conservative foreign policy” are being forced to back-pedal. Mr Krauthammer quotes Jon Stewart, the presenter of Comedy Central's wildly popular mock news programme: “What if Bush has been right about this all along? I feel that my world view will not sustain itself and I may...implode.” There has been a good deal of imploding already among anti-war Democrats, with even Ted Kennedy proclaiming that George Bush deserves credit for the stirrings in the Middle East.

The neo-conservatives are also taking heart from ... Mr Bush's decision this week to nominate John Bolton as America's ambassador to the United Nations. Mr Bolton is more “con” than “neo-con”. (Cons, for example, were against keeping troops in Iraq after the end of the war.) But at the least he is one of the neo-conservatives' favourite conservatives. He shares their distrust of multilateral institutions, with their airy-fairy waffle and their predilection for impinging on American sovereignty. He described his signing of a document formally notifying Kofi Annan of America's intention, in effect, to withdraw from the International Criminal Court as “the happiest moment of my government service”. Two of the neo-cons' great heroes, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, were both at their finest as UN-bashing ambassadors to the UN; Mr Bolton is well placed to follow in their footsteps.

Tony Blair and Rupert Murdoch

2005-03-16T15:49:00.000-08:00

The Economist:
Mr Blair has paid a price to keep the Sun more or less on side. Because its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, detests the European Union, the enthusiastically pro-European Mr Blair has made only the occasional timid foray on the subject. His U-turn over holding a referendum on the European constitution is said to have come shortly after one of Irwin Stelzer's frequent visits to Downing Street. Mr Stelzer, a neo-conservative economist, is known as Mr Murdoch's vicar on earth. Coincidentally, the Sun broke the news that Mr Blair was close to conceding a referendum some weeks before the announcement was made.

If a deal was done, Mr Blair got the worse of it. Although the Sun will probably endorse Labour again, it has become increasingly unfriendly over the past few years. Except, that is, in its strident support for Mr Blair over Iraq and terrorism. Mr Murdoch admires Mr Blair's courage for supporting President Bush and is not prepared to sacrifice him just yet. That is not likely to happen until the referendum next year.

Hitchens on WMD "Organized Looting"

2005-03-16T09:39:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hitchens:
My first question is this: How can it be that, on every page of every other edition for months now, the New York Times has been stating categorically that Iraq harbored no weapons of mass destruction? And there can hardly be a comedy-club third-rater or MoveOn.org activist in the entire country who hasn't stated with sarcastic certainty that the whole WMD fuss was a way of lying the American people into war. So now what? Maybe we should have taken Saddam's propaganda seriously, when his newspaper proudly described Iraq's physicists as "our nuclear mujahideen."

My second question is: What's all this about "looting"? The word is used throughout the long report, but here's what it's used to describe. "In four weeks from mid-April to mid-May of 2003 … teams with flatbed trucks and other heavy equipment moved systematically from site to site. … 'The first wave came for the machines,' Dr Araji said. 'The second wave, cables and cranes.' " Perhaps hedging the bet, the Times authors at this point refer to "organized looting."

But obviously, what we are reading about is a carefully planned military operation. The participants were not panicked or greedy civilians helping themselves—which is the customary definition of a "looter," especially in wartime. They were mechanized and mobile and under orders, and acting in a concerted fashion. Thus, if the story is factually correct—which we have no reason at all to doubt—then Saddam's Iraq was a fairly highly-evolved WMD state, with a contingency plan for further concealment and distribution of the weaponry in case of attack or discovery.

The New York Times on Senate filibusters

2005-03-15T22:07:00.000-08:00

The Weekly Standard Scrapbook:
Obligatory New York Times Hypocrisy Item

A January 1, 1995, Times editorial on proposals to restrict the use of Senate filibusters:

In the last session of Congress, the Republican minority invoked an endless string of filibusters to frustrate the will of the majority. This relentless abuse of a time-honored Senate tradition so disgusted Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, that he is now willing to forgo easy retribution and drastically limit the filibuster. Hooray for him. . . . Once a rarely used tactic reserved for issues on which senators held passionate views, the filibuster has become the tool of the sore loser, . . . an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose.

A March 6, 2005, Times editorial on the same subject:

The Republicans are claiming that 51 votes should be enough to win confirmation of the White House's judicial nominees. This flies in the face of Senate history. . . . To block the nominees, the Democrats' weapon of choice has been the filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod. . . . The Bush administration likes to call itself "conservative," but there is nothing conservative about endangering one of the great institutions of American democracy, the United States Senate, for the sake of an ideological crusade.

John Cornyn
To the Editor:
"The Senate on the Brink" (editorial, March 6) supports the "historic role of the filibuster," which is a curious position for a newspaper that 10 years ago said filibusters were "the tool of the sore loser" and should be eliminated ("Time to Retire the Filibuster," editorial, Jan. 1, 1995).

Federal judicial appointments have certainly been controversial, but surely all Americans can agree that the rules for confirming judges should be the same regardless of which party has a majority.

Now you praise the filibuster as a "time-honored Senate procedure." In 1995, when Bill Clinton was president, you called it "an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose."

You disparage the Republicans' view that 51 votes should be enough for judicial confirmation. Yet the 51-vote rule is a consistent Senate tradition. By calling for an end to filibusters, the Senate is simply contemplating restoring its traditions by traditional methods you disparage as "nuclear," even though they were once endorsed by such leading Democrats as Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Charles E. Schumer and Robert C. Byrd.

John Cornyn
U.S. Senator from Texas
Washington, March 7, 2005

"perhaps the biggest anti-government demonstration ever staged in the Arab world"

2005-03-14T18:35:00.000-08:00

ABC News:
Hundreds of thousands of anti-Syrian demonstrators flooded the capital Monday in the biggest protest ever in Lebanon, surpassing the turnout for an earlier pro-Damascus rally organized by the Islamic militant Hezbollah. In a show of national unity, Sunnis, Druse and Christians packed Martyrs' Square as brass bands played and balloons soared skyward.

The rally, perhaps the biggest anti-government demonstration ever staged in the Arab world, was the opposition's bid to regain momentum after two serious blows: the reinstatement of the pro-Syrian prime minister and a huge rally last week by the Shiite group Hezbollah.

George W. Bush, Arab Hero

2005-03-14T14:37:00.000-08:00

From James Taranto.
The Cedar Revolution continues, the Associated Press reports from Beirut:

Hundreds of thousands of opposition demonstrators chanted "Freedom, sovereignty, independence" and unfurled a huge Lebanese flag in Beirut on Monday, the biggest protest yet in the opposition's duel of street rallies with supporters of the Damascus-backed government. . . .

A line of people in the square carried a 100-yard-long white-and-red Lebanese flag with the distinct green cedar tree in the middle, shaking it up and down and shouting, "Syria out."

Protesters chanted "Truth, freedom, national unity!" or "We want only the Lebanese army in Lebanon!"

"Syria out, no half measures," read a banner, borrowing from President Bush's description of Damascus' gradual withdrawal from this country of 3.5 million.

That's right, they're quoting President Bush, the simian-American unilateralist cowboy! And they're not alone. In a Washington Post essay, Youssef Ibrahim, formerly a reporter for the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and now a Dubai-based consultant, says that throughout the Arab world are coming "murmurs of approval for the devoutly Christian U.S. president, whose persistent calls for democracy in the Middle East are looking less like preaching and more like timely encouragement":

"His talk about democracy is good," an Egyptian-born woman was telling companions at the Fatafeet (or "Crumbs") restaurant the other night, exuberant enough for her voice to carry to neighboring tables. "He keeps hitting this nail. That's good, by God, isn't it?" At another table, a Lebanese man was waxing enthusiastic over Bush's blunt and irreverent manner toward Arab autocrats. "It is good to light a fire under their feet," he said.

From Casablanca to Kuwait City, the writings of newspaper columnists and the chatter of pundits on Arabic language satellite television suggest a change in climate for advocates of human rights, constitutional reforms, business transparency, women's rights and limits on power. And while developments differ vastly from country to country, their common feature is a lifting--albeit a tentative one--of the fear that has for decades constricted the Arab mind.

Regardless of Bush's intentions--which many Arabs and Muslims still view with suspicion--the U.S. president and his neoconservative crowd are helping to spawn a spirit of reform and a new vigor to confront dynastic dictatorships and other assorted ills.

Ibraham himself admits to second thoughts: "It's enough for someone like me, who has felt that Bush's attitude toward the Mideast has been all wrong, to wonder whether his idea of setting the Muslim house in order is right."

A sudden, powerful stirring

2005-03-12T23:28:00.000-08:00

Fouad Ajami:
In retrospect, it was an appearance by President George W. Bush before the National Endowment for Democracy, in November 2003, that signaled the birth of a new "diplomacy of freedom" in the Arab world. The American military effort in Iraq was in its early stages then; the euphoria of the military campaign had ended, and a war of attrition had begun. Saddam Hussein was still on the loose, and there was no trace of those vaunted weapons of mass destruction that had taken us to war. At that uncertain hour, Bush proposed nothing less than a break with the ways of American diplomacy in the region. "Sixty years of western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run," he said, "stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export."

Today the Arab world is beset by a mighty storm. For decades, the American choice in Arab-Islamic lands was stark. The "civil society" there was truculent and malignantly anti-American, while the rulers seemed like eminently reasonable men willing to strike bargains in the shadows. It was easy to accept their authoritarianism as the cultural practice of the Arabs: This was what Bush called the "soft bigotry of low expectations."

...

We know that America has paid dearly for this democratic movement, in both blood and treasure, for this democratizing push was given force by Iraq's elections. But the outlines of a new Arab world may now be dimly seen. A brilliant American officer, Lt. Col. Mark Martins, whom I met in Baghdad, allowed himself a moment of satisfaction. "Democracy is not a luxury car," he E-mailed me last week. "It is an all-terrain vehicle and good for fighting insurgency."

We now take democracy on those hard Arab roads. It is their world, and they must repair it. But they hang on Bush's words, in Damascus and Beirut, and in Cairo as well.

Grudging Respect

2005-03-11T10:24:00.000-08:00

The New Republic:
Give liberals credit. Rather than churlishly dismiss signs that the White House may have jump-started Middle Eastern democratization, most liberals have taken the responsible course and applauded recent developments in Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq. "The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances," wrote the granddaddy of liberal opinion, The New York Times editorial page. Ted Kennedy seconded that sentiment on ABC's "This Week": "What's taken place in a number of those countries is enormously constructive. It's a reflection the president has been involved." Hardly the peevish response many conservatives privately expected.

But, if liberals aren't blinded by partisanship when assessing the dramatic events of these last few weeks, their response does have a certain grudging quality (reflective perhaps not only of discomfort with George W. Bush, but also regret that Bill Clinton did not make democratization in the Middle East his obsession). One detects this reluctance especially in the tendency to dwell far more on potential setbacks than opportunities, and to focus on advances in parts of the world where the administration can't plausibly claim credit. Take, for example, the preeminent liberal blog, Daily Kos, which spent thousands upon thousands of words chewing over Ukraine's Orange Revolution. So far, it has featured only two short posts on Lebanon's equally stirring Cedar Revolution--and both were notable mostly for their pessimism.

...

...liberals must realize that they have to be willing to support the Bush administration in the Middle East if they want to have anything to say about democracy elsewhere in the world. Liberals rightly accuse the White House of talking up its democratic successes in the region while downplaying backsliding in places like Russia. But the same logic applies to the left. How can liberals be outspokenly in favor of democratization in Russia but only tepidly endorse it in Lebanon, just because an administration they detest might get credit for it? The answer is that they can't. When it comes to democracy-building, there's enough credit--and enough work--to go around.

The Arab spring

2005-03-11T10:21:00.000-08:00

Jeff Jacoby:
"It is time to set down in type the most difficult sentence in the English language. That sentence is short and simple. It is this: Bush was right."

Thus spake columnist Richard Gwyn of the Toronto Star, author of such earlier offerings as "Incurious George W. can't grasp democracy," "Time for US to cut and run," and, as recently as Jan. 25, "Bush's hubristic world view."

The Axis of Weasel is crying uncle, and much of the chorus is singing from the same songsheet.

Listen to Claus Christian Malzahn in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel: "Could George W. be right?" And Guy Sorman in France's Le Figaro: "And if Bush was right?" And NPR's Daniel Schorr in The Christian Science Monitor: "The Iraq effect? Bush may have had it right." And London's Independent, in a Page 1 headline on Monday: "Was Bush right after all?"

Even Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's "Daily Show" and an indefatigable Bush critic, has learned the new lyrics. "Here's the great fear that I have," he said recently. "What if Bush . . . has been right about this all along? I feel like my world view will not sustain itself and I may . . . implode."

For those of us in the War Party, by contrast, these are heady days. If you've agreed with President Bush all along that the way to fight the cancer of Islamist terrorism is with the chemotherapy of freedom and democracy, the temptation to issue I-told-you-so's can be hard to resist.

The European Street

2005-03-10T19:16:00.000-08:00

Amir Taheri:
Why are so many Westerners, living in mature democracies, ready to march against the toppling of a despot in Iraq but unwilling to take to the streets in support of the democratic movement in the Middle East?

Is it because many of those who will be marching in support of Saddam Hussein this month are the remnants of totalitarian groups in the West plus a variety of misinformed idealists and others blinded by anti-Americanism?

The Left Reconsiders

2005-03-09T18:22:00.000-08:00

By Dawn's Early Light: There is a growing list of "Could Bush be Right?" articles from Europe, America and the Left in general.

Kerry: "An assassination made this happen"

2005-03-09T18:05:00.000-08:00

The Washington Times: Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry, whose criticism of Mr. Bush's Iraq policy did not translate into a presidential victory in November, said Mr. Bush deserves no credit for recent developments in the Middle East.

"An assassination made this happen," Mr. Kerry said, referring to the car bomb that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri last month. The killing has been blamed on Syria.

...

A senior Democratic Senate aide acknowledged that many in his party were surprised by recent developments in the Middle East and realized that attacking the president on the war would have less bite.

"You have to give the guy a modicum of credit," the senior aide said. "There's no denying that the Iraq vote could be a catalyst for change in the region. Everyone up here, Democrats and Republicans, want to see peace in that region."

Such conciliatory comments, however, contrast sharply with the heated anti-war rhetoric of just six weeks ago. Mr. Kennedy was the most vocal, calling the entire Iraqi operation a "failure" and demanding immediate U.S. withdrawal.

"Our military and the insurgents are fighting for the same thing -- the hearts and minds of the people -- and that is a battle we are not winning," Mr. Kennedy said in a speech at Johns Hopkins University just three days before Iraq's first free election in decades.

Mr. Kennedy also called Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam" in a Jan. 12 speech at the National Press Club, insisting Mr. Bush "has bogged America down in an endless quagmire."

Another Democratic Senate aide said he doesn't expect to hear much of that kind of talk in the future.

"Even if things start to go south, I think we all agree that ripping Bush over this is not very constructive," he said. "And nobody wants to be on the wrong side of this if it continues to go well, either."

President's Critics Reconsider Democracy's Prospects in the Middle East

2005-03-09T17:58:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post:
Given Bush's insistence that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq would lead to a democratic political order in the Middle East, many Europeans are "somewhat embarrassed" by these developments, Sorman wrote in Le Figaro.

"Hadn't they promised, governments and media alike, that the Arab street would rise up [against U.S. military forces], that Islam would burn, that the American army would get bogged down, that the terrorist attacks would multiply, and that democracy would not result nor be exported?"

"These dramas did not occur," Sorman says. "Either Bush is lucky, or it is too early to judge or [Bush's] analysis was not false."

...

In Germany, the economic daily Financial Times Deutschland accused Europeans of ignoring events in Lebanon. "It is bizarre that here in Germany, where the Berlin Wall once stood, this development (in Lebanon) is greeted with hardly a shrug," according to a translation by Der Spiegel Web site. The paper borrowed a phrase from New Yorker columnist Kurt Andersen saying that Europe is engaging in political "short selling -- hoping for bad news to back up the continent's 'ideological investment'" in opposing Bush.

"Short selling," the paper concluded, "is an honorable strategy on the stock exchange but in terms of democracy, it is looking more and more like a major mistake. Indeed, it isn't honorable at all."

Admit it: Bush was right on Iraq

2005-03-09T17:52:00.000-08:00

Toronto Star anti-war columnist Richard Gwyn: on the defining, fundamental question, Bush was right.

He understood that to defeat an idea, no matter how perverse and brutal it might be, it was necessary to have an opposite and superior idea.

He understood, in other words — instinctively rather than intellectually — that the only way to win a war against terrorism was to turn it into a war for democracy.

This is now happening. Against the quest of ordinary Iraqis for dignity and self-respect and freedom, the terrorists in Iraq had nothing ultimately to offer, except blood and hatred.

Was Bush right after all?

2005-03-07T18:49:00.000-08:00

The Independent: the first phase of Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon is another sign of change across the Middle East. The precise extent and implications of the pull-out (or to be more accurate pull-back) are still unclear, and the same goes for the host of other developments, from Palestine to Iraq, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia. Some may be sincere and lasting, others contrived and short-lived, but all suggest the political straitjacket that has long imprisoned the Arab world is loosening, if not yet coming apart at the seams.

It is barely six weeks since the US President delivered his second inaugural address, a paean to liberty and democracy that espoused the goal of "ending tyranny in our world". Reactions around the world ranged from alarm to amused scorn, from fears of a new round of "regime changes" imposed by an all-powerful American military, to suspicions in the salons of Europe that this time Mr Bush, never celebrated for his grasp of world affairs, had finally lost it. No one imagined that events would so soon cause the President's opponents around the world to question whether he had got it right.

That debate is now happening, in America and beyond, as the first waves of reform lap at the Arab world.

Three Cheers for the Bush Doctrine

2005-03-07T18:24:00.000-08:00

Charles Krauthammer:
Two years ago, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, I argued in these pages that forcefully deposing Saddam Hussein was, more than anything, about America "coming ashore" to effect a "pan-Arab reformation"--a dangerous, "risky and, yes, arrogant" but necessary attempt to change the very culture of the Middle East, to open its doors to democracy and modernity.

The Administration went ahead with this great project knowing it would be hostage to history. History has begun to speak. Elections in Afghanistan, a historic first. Elections in Iraq, a historic first. Free Palestinian elections producing a moderate leadership, two historic firsts. Municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, men only, but still a first. In Egypt, demonstrations for democracy--unheard of in decades--prompting the dictator to announce free contested presidential elections, a historic first.

And now, of course, the most romantic flowering of the spirit America went into the region to foster: the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, in which unarmed civilians, Christian and Muslim alike, brought down the puppet government installed by Syria.

...

When Ronald Reagan declared that the unfreedom imposed by communism was simply unsustainable and that it should be not appeased or accommodated, but instead forced--by the power and will of free peoples--into the ash heap of history, he was ridiculed and patronized as a simpleton. Clark Clifford famously called him an amiable dunce. The amiable dunce went on to win the cold war.

Two decades later, another patronized President. Our intellectuals and Middle East "experts" have been telling us that Bush's grand project to democratize the region is the fantasy of a historical illiterate. Faced with the stunning Iraqi election, they went to great lengths to attribute this inconvenient yet undeniable success to the courage of the Iraqi people.

This is all very nice. But this courage was rather dormant before the American invasion.

Not in your name

2005-03-07T18:08:00.000-08:00

Mark Steyn:
By the way, when's the next Not In Our Name rally? How about this Saturday? Millions of NIONists can flood into the centers of San Francisco, New York, Brussels and Paris to proclaim to folks in Iraq and Lebanon and Egypt and Syria and Jordan and Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority that all the changes under way in the region are most certainly Not In Their Name.

Well, I'm glad they're in mine. I got a lot of things wrong these last three years, but, looking at events this last week, I'm glad that, unlike the Nionist Entity, I got the big stuff right. On May 8, 2003, a couple of weeks after the fall of Saddam, I wrote:

"You don't invade Iraq in order to invade everywhere else, you invade Iraq so you don't have to invade everywhere else."

And so it has turned out.

...

A couple of years back, I went to hear Paul Wolfowitz. I knew him only by reputation: the most sinister of all the neocons, the big bad Wolfowitz, the man whose name started with a scary animal and ended Jewishly. In fact, he was a very soft-spoken chap, who compared the challenges of the Middle East with America's experiments in democracy-spreading after World War II. He said he thought it would take less time than Japan, and maybe something closer to the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe.

...

The lesson of these last weeks is that it turns out Washington's Zionists know the Arab people a lot better than Europe's Arabists.

Islamism, with its plans to destroy America, take back Europe, colonize Australia and set you up with 72 virgins, may be bonkers but it's a big idea. And you can't beat it with a small, shriveled idea like another decade or three of Mubarak or Assad or some such. The Bush administration decided the only big idea they had to sell was liberty. On Jan. 30, Bush's big idea squared off against the head-hackers' big idea -- you vote, you die -- and we know which one the Iraqi people chose, and which the rest of the region, to one degree or another, is following.

With hindsight, the fellow travelers were let off far too easily when the Iron Curtain fell like a discarded burqa. Little more than a decade later, they barely hesitated a moment before jumping in on the wrong side of history yet again. Not in your name? Don't worry, it's not.

Thanks, America

2005-03-07T10:18:00.000-08:00

The New York Sun:
Iraq's and Afghanistan's new ministers for women's affairs thanked America for liberating their countries, especially their women, at a press briefing yesterday sponsored by Freedom House, America's oldest human-rights organization.

At the pro-democracy group's Wall Street offices, Afghanistan's minister of women's affairs, Massouda Jalal, and Iraq's minister of state for women's affairs, Narmin Othman, spoke of how new constitutions and recent elections have advanced women's freedom in their countries. They also urged continued support for their fledgling democracies from the American government, and they encouraged increased support from America's press, civic organizations, and private sector.

...

Saying her countrymen "will never forget the help" Americans provided in creating the new Afghanistan, Dr. Jalal told her audience: "The children - they know the name of President Bush. ... They realize the Americans are helping us." Aiding women, she added, was important to ensuring that her country's next generation carries on the Afghan-American friendship, because 99% of Afghan women are mothers.

Ms. Othman, too, expressed gratitude for American help in advancing freedom in her country, saying the removal of Saddam Hussein was "wonderful."

"You should never think you did a wrong thing. You did a very big thing for the Iraqi people," the minister said.

Bill Richardson, Neo-Con

2005-03-07T09:02:00.000-08:00

The Indepundit: "He almost sounds like one of those awful neo-cons I've heard about."

NBC'S TODAY, 7:10am PST March 7, 2005.

KATIE COURIC: Let's turn to Lebanon, if we could for a moment, Governor. Because as you know, Syrian President Assad has announced that his troops will withdraw from Lebanon, a country that Syria has occupied since the mid-70s. For people who may not be foreign policy experts, how significant is this?

NEW MEXICO GOVERNOR BILL RICHARDSON (D): Well, this is very significant. I believe the Bush Administration deserves credit for putting pressure, and saying that authoritarian regimes have to go. What is happening here is, the assassination of a very popular former prime minister in Lebanon, has fueled massive demonstrations in Lebanon, that hopefully will lead to all 14,000 Syrian troops out of Lebanon, plus their intelligence agents, by May. It means that in Lebanon, in Egypt there's some potential new elections. The Palestinian Territories; in Iraq; I think there's a wave of democracy caused by internal pressures, of young people in the Arab world, rooting against these authoritarian regimes--and pressure from the Bush Administration--

KATIE COURIC: I--

BILL RICHARDSON: They deserve credit.

KATIE COURIC: I was going to say, because a lot of foreign policy experts are hailing the Bush Administration's policies, and saying the Bush Doctrine, of spreading democracy throughout the world, there's clear evidence that it's working. You agree with that assessment?

BILL RICHARDSON: Well, it is working. Whether by design, or by accident, it is working. The fact that the President has spoken out, where in the past the US policy has winked at Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, because of their massive security, and we have energy interests there, we have military bases, we kind of said, "OK, it's alright not to be democratic. The President, in talking about freedom and democracy, is sparking a wave of very positive democratic sentiment that might help us override both Islamic fundamentalism that has formed in that region, and also some of the hatred for our policies of invading Iraq. So, this is not only bringing a good result in the Middle East, potential democracy and full elections, but also it is helping our security, perhaps making us safer, by having less Islamic fundamentalism--

KATIE COURIC: Right.

BILL RICHARDSON: ...because democracy provides an outlet against it. And also, younger Arabs that are fueling this discontent throughout the Arab world, becoming pro-US, which is a good sign for the future.

KATIE COURIC: Alright. Good news indeed.

What Bush Got Right

2005-03-07T02:18:00.000-08:00

Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek:
Across New York, Los Angeles and Chicago—and probably Europe and Asia as well—people are nervously asking themselves a question: "Could he possibly have been right?" The short answer is yes. Whether or not Bush deserves credit for everything that is happening in the Middle East, he has been fundamentally right about some big things.

Bush never accepted the view that Islamic terrorism had its roots in religion or culture or the Arab-Israeli conflict. Instead he veered toward the analysis that the region was breeding terror because it had developed deep dysfunctions caused by decades of repression and an almost total lack of political, economic and social modernization. The Arab world, in this analysis, was almost unique in that over the past three decades it had become increasingly unfree, even as the rest of the world was opening up. His solution, therefore, was to push for reform in these lands.

"Bush sends his greetings!"

2005-03-07T02:04:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times: In Martyrs' Square here, the scene of many demonstrations in recent weeks, thousands of protesters came Saturday morning to watch a broadcast of Mr. Assad's speech on projection screens, at times booing and jeering, or calling "Liar!" and "Bush sends his greetings!"

The protesters, many dressed in white, waved Lebanese flags and called for "freedom, sovereignty and independence."

Update:

Jim Geraghty to editorial cartoonist Tom Toles: how do you choose to portray Syrian dictator Assad?

As Winnie the Pooh! And he’s gone and stirred up a bee’s nest, by trying to get some honey from the Cedar tree of Lebanon!

Oh, poison pen, how bitter is thy sting! I’m sure that portrayal has the dictator, with his secret police, in a fetal position and crying from its satirical wickedness! Never has the Syrian regime, with its rampant human rights abuses and relentless exploitation of Lebanon, been portrayed so nastily nor as honestly as your depiction of it as one of the most beloved and harmless Disney characters of all time!

Where’s a profiles in courage award when we need one?

The insurgency is over.

2005-03-07T01:26:00.000-08:00

From Power Line:
Haider Ajina has translated for us a poll that appeared today in the Iraqi newspaper Al-Sabah Al-Jadeed. The poll surveyed 2,878 Iraqis in and around Baghdad:

Do you support the severe measures the Iraqi Government is taking against terrorist acts in Iraq?
93.56% = Yes
6.44% = No

How do you think Arabic satellite news companies are covering Iraqi news?

Neutral = 16.75%
Not Neutral = 7.25%
Negatively Biased = 76%

This is why I keep saying: the "insurgency" is over. The terrorists lost. What is going on now is just crime. Criminals can kill, but they can't affect history.

Something stirs

2005-03-06T17:05:00.000-08:00

The Economist:
In Bratislava a fortnight ago, Mr Bush drew a link between Iraq’s vote, Czechoslovakia’s “velvet revolution” of 1989, Georgia’s “rose revolution” at the end of 2003, and Ukraine’s recent “orange revolution”. He would say that. But a growing number of Arab voices are chiming in, too.

In a widely noticed interview, Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon’s Druze, told the Washington Post that Iraq’s election was the Arab equivalent of the fall of the Berlin wall. Hisham Kassem, a former publisher of the Cairo Times, called the elections the “start of a ripple effect”. Khaled al-Meena, the editor of Saudi Arabia’s Arab News, says that if elections can be held under foreign occupation in Iraq and Palestine, it should be much easier to hold them in Arab states said to be “free”.

...

Even in Syria the feeling that change is inevitable has become palpable. Hafez Assad’s son Bashir has proved a weak leader, isolated both by the war in Iraq and his behaviour in Lebanon. Many other Arabs still share the Syrian regime’s sense of being under siege, its deep mistrust of the West, and its loathing for Israel. Yet they are also aware that the armed intifada in Palestine and the Iraqi insurgency have lost their sheen. They know that state socialism is a dud, and—after Saddam Hussein’s fall—that dictatorship is ultimately disastrous. Growing numbers are willing to say that Islam is threatened more by its own demons than by the West’s armies.

An Arab democratic opening will be long and tortuous. The regimes that block it are strong, cunning and ruthless. The rhetoric of “resistance”—Islamist, Arab nationalist, anti-American, anti-globalisation, or whatever—retains a powerful grip. Many Arabs still support groups such as al-Qaeda. A huge amount still depends on the outcome in Iraq: a descent into chaos or the failure of the political process there could crush democratic stirrings throughout the region. For all these reasons, it is probably too early for the Americans to crow about an Arab year of revolutions. All the same, the distance between George Bush’s talk of freedom and Arab aspirations, which only recently seemed to yawn so wide, may at last be starting to close.

The New York Times: "I told you the opposite"

2005-03-06T02:18:00.000-08:00

JustOneMinute:
Nobody Likes An "I Told You So"
But how do we feel about an "I told you the opposite"?

The NY Times, Jan 12:

Facing Facts About Iraq's Election

When the United States was debating whether to invade Iraq, there was one outcome that everyone agreed had to be avoided at all costs: a civil war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims that would create instability throughout the Middle East and give terrorists a new, ungoverned region that they could use as a base of operations. The coming elections - long touted as the beginning of a new, democratic Iraq - are looking more and more like the beginning of that worst-case scenario.

It's time to talk about postponing the elections.

And here is the much-discussed NY Times editorial from March 1:

Mideast Climate Change

It's not even spring yet, but a long-frozen political order seems to be cracking all over the Middle East. Cautious hopes for something new and better are stirring along the Tigris and the Nile, the elegant boulevards of Beirut, and the impoverished towns of the Gaza Strip. It is far too soon for any certainties about ultimate outcomes. In Iraq, a brutal insurgency still competes for headlines with post-election democratic maneuvering. Yesterday a suicide bomber plowed into a crowd of Iraqi police and Army recruits, killing at least 122 people - the largest death toll in a single such bombing since the American invasion nearly two years ago. And the Palestinian terrorists who blew up a Tel Aviv nightclub last Friday underscored the continuing fragility of what has now been almost two months of steady political and diplomatic progress between Israelis and Palestinians.

Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power. Washington's challenge now lies in finding ways to nurture and encourage these still fragile trends without smothering them in a triumphalist embrace.

From the paper of impressive track record.

Dale Franks: "Finally, the NYT is on board with Democracy promotion in the Mideast. Glad to have you aboard, guys."

The Public Interest

2005-03-05T21:37:00.000-08:00

David Brooks: The contributors to The Public Interest could write intelligently about such broad moral subjects because not only were they public policy experts, but they were also careful readers of Jane Austen, Lionel Trilling, Tocqueville, Nietzsche and so on. This was before intellectuals were divided between academic professionals and think-tank policy wonks.

It was about this time people started calling The Public Interest a neoconservative magazine. I'm not sure that word still has meaning, but if there was one core insight, it was this: Human beings, or governments, are not black boxes engaged in a competition of interests. What matters most is the character of the individual, the character of the community and the character of government. When designing policies, it's most important to get them to complement, not undermine, people's permanent moral aspirations - the longing for freedom, faith and family happiness.

That approach led to welfare policies that encouraged work and responsibility. It also led to what many derided as the overly idealistic foreign policies that are now contributing to the exhilarating revolutions we're seeing across the Middle East.

Who Would Choose Tyranny?

2005-03-04T08:17:00.000-08:00

From The Corner
Michael Kelly, February 26, 2003: "Tyranny truly is a horror: an immense, endlessly bloody, endlessly painful, endlessly varied, endless crime against not humanity in the abstract but a lot of humans in the flesh. It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face.

"I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications of, America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realized. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot?"

What have the Americans ever done for us?

2005-03-04T07:32:00.000-08:00

Gerard Baker:
One of my favourite cinematic moments is the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian when Reg, aka John Cleese, the leader of the People’s Front of Judea, is trying to whip up anti-Roman sentiment among his team of slightly hesitant commandos.
“What have the Romans ever done for us?” he asks.

“Well, there’s the aqueduct,” somebody says, thoughtfully. “The sanitation,” says another. “Public order,” offers a third. Reg reluctantly acknowledges that there may have been a couple of benefits. But then steadily, and with increasing enthusiasm, his men reel off a litany of the good things the Romans have wrought with their occupation of the Holy Land.

By the time they’re finished they’re not so sure about the whole insurgency idea after all and an exasperated Reg tries to rally them: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

I can’t help but think of that scene as I watch the contortions of the anti-American hordes in Britain, Europe and even in the US itself in response to the remarkable events that are unfolding in the real Middle East today.

--------------------------------------------------------------
10 things to celebrate
Why I'm an anti-anti-American
by Dinesh D'Souza

Neocons May Get the Last Laugh

2005-03-03T16:40:00.000-08:00

Max Boot:
In 2003, more than a month before the invasion of Iraq, I wrote in the Weekly Standard that the forthcoming fall of Baghdad "may turn out to be one of those hinge moments in history — events like the storming of the Bastille or the fall of the Berlin Wall — after which everything is different. If the occupation goes well (admittedly a big if), it may mark the moment when the powerful antibiotic known as democracy was introduced into the diseased environment of the Middle East, and began to transform the region for the better."

At the time, this kind of talk was dismissed by pretty much everyone not employed by the White House as neocon nuttiness. Democracy in the Middle East? Introduced by way of Iraq? You've got to be kidding! The only real debate in sophisticated circles was whether those who talked of democracy were simply naive fools or whether their risible rhetoric was meant to hide some sinister motive.

Well, who's the simpleton now? Those who dreamed of spreading democracy to the Arabs or those who denied that it could ever happen? Of course, the outcome is far from clear, and even in Iraq democracy is hardly well established. Yet some pretty extraordinary things have been happening in the last few weeks.

National Security

2005-03-03T14:02:00.000-08:00

Matthew Yglesias: the poll doesn't find much support for the notion that a dash to the right on cultural issues is the way out. They asked "which party comes closer to sharing your view on abortion" and 45 percent said the Democrats to just 35 percent for the Republicans. They asked "which party comes closer to sharing your view on the legal recognition of gay couples," and the Democrats got 42 percent to the GOP's 37 percent.

Which is all by way of returning to my long-time hobbyhorse -- to wit: The Democratic Party's political trouble is explained almost entirely by the fact that the country does not trust it with national security.

Election Shock Treatment

2005-03-02T23:01:00.000-08:00

From The Weekly Standard:
With things looking up for a change, this has been a rough patch of time for the Democrats. They have been suffering from Election Shock Treatment; which means the success of the Iraqi elections has shocked them into the realization that they may have to seek treatment, because of the trauma induced by the growing suspicion that President Bush has been right all along: right in the decision to go into Iraq; right in the decision to hang tough in Palestine; right in the belief that Muslims and Arabs may also want freedom; that elections there can be held, and succeed.

But even before this last "bad" (read, good) news, things had turned grim for the quagmire addicts, with the terrible realization that events elsewhere had not taken a turn for the worse. In August 2004, for instance, Australian Prime Minister John Howard was not defeated for his sin of backing Bush in the Iraqi invasion, dealing no blow at all to the Bush coalition. Then the Afghan elections went all too smoothly, despite the fact that the country, three years earlier, had been a perfect model of 13th century governance. Then the Palestinians, after Arafat's death, had the gall to start edging somewhat away from their ideological precipice, suggesting we might face a third non-disaster, a prospect too ghastly to contemplate.

In December, some of the savvier commentators had begun suggesting that Bush's democracy project was showing signs of working, and Martin Gilbert, the biographer of Winston S Churchill, had written that Bush and his main man Tony Blair might stand some day with Churchill and Roosevelt. Among the in crowd--which had been appalled when Ronald Reagan, the amiable dunce, was declared by serious people the liberator of the people of Communist Europe--the idea that history might repeat itself was too much to bear.

"The success of the elections poses a major intellectual-moral political problem for people in this city," writes Kurt Andersen in New York, a magazine which even in its first issue after 9/11 could not restrain itself from taking a few swipes at the red states and "their" president. "Now the people of this Bush-hating city are being forced to grant the merest possibility that Bush, despite his annoying manner . . . hubris and dissembling and incompetence . . . just might--might possibly--have been correct to invade, to occupy, and to try to enable a democratically elected government in Iraq."

The Left on Lebanon

2005-03-02T21:46:00.000-08:00

Jim Geraghty:
From left-of-center blogger Matt Yglesias:

I don't think that's a reason not to hope for the emergence of real democracy in Lebanon, but it's a bit of a sticky situation. More to the point, there simply doesn't seem to me to be any major geopolitical windfall we could possibly reap from any outcomes in Lebanon. It's a country that's very important to Syrian interests, pretty important to Israeli interests, and not really important at all to the United States. It just happens to be kinda-sorta near the strategically important Persian Gulf region. But nothing really bad has happened to us thanks to Syrian control, and nothing really good will happen to us if it ends.

I try not to relentlessly mock those of the left of me (stop laughing), but on something like this, I cannot help but gasp at the breathtaking hard-heartedness and limited vision to conclude nothing good happens to the U.S. if Syria is forced out of Lebanon.

For starters, try talking to some Lebanese. Every one I've talked to here in the U.S. wants the Syrians out. Do Americans benefit from happy Lebanese? Well, yeah. Happy people don't become anti-American terrorists.

And:
Stephen Green isn't all that impressed with some recent comments by Ed Kilgore, blogging at Josh Marshall's site.

Sure, Lebanon has been under Syria's boot for a quarter century, so it's just coincidence that the locals are demanding freedom at the same time Iraqis are getting theirs.

Sure, Saudis have never voted ever, so it's just coincidence that they had their first-ever, semi-free, all-male elections around the same time Iraqis got theirs.

Sure, Egyptians haven't been promised a free election since the Brits left (and before the Brits even arrived), so it's just coincidence that they're getting promised one right after the Iraqis got theirs.

Sure, Syrians have never had free elections and aren't about to get any, but it's still just coincidence that they're facing an uprising of popular will right after Iraqis expressed their popular will.

Maybe, in the world of Joshua Micah Marshall, that's all just circumstantial evidence.

But juries have convicted guilty men on far less.

Smile, Josh — we're winning the damn war. Why can't you admit, just once, that the guy in charge is doing an OK job?

Update:
A Guardian columnist: "Put starkly, we cannot let ourselves fall into the trap of opposing democracy in the Middle East simply because Bush and Blair are calling for it. Sometimes your enemy's enemy is not your friend."

Bush and Reagan bashing

2005-03-02T18:57:00.000-08:00

Steve Conover:
Ed Kilgore, Policy Director of the Democratic Leadership Council, rejects the idea that Bush’s mideast policies have something to do with recent events in Lebanon. Not only that, but he craftily uses it as an opportunity to segue into a brief sidebar of Reagan bashing:

That is the kind of thinking, of course, that has convinced God knows how many people that Ronald Reagan personally won the Cold War. It's the old post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) logical fallacy.

...

Quote #1, before Reagan’s presidency and the Cold War climax:
"My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose. What do you think about
that?"
--Ronald Reagan in 1977, to his future national security advisor Richard Allen

Quote #2, after the Soviet Union’s collapse:
"He was an authentic person and a great person. If someone else had been in his place, I don't know if what happened would have happened."
--Mikhail Gorbachev, reflecting on Reagan in a videotaped interview

Isn't it interesting that the leader of the side that lost the Cold War has a higher opinion of Reagan's role than Ed Kilgore and his fellow Reagan bashers do? But Gorbachev had no vested interest in denying it; that explains why his opinion differs from Kilgore’s.

Ward Churchill a neo-con test case!

2005-03-02T17:23:00.000-08:00

From Instapundit:

The acting chair of the University of Colorado ethnic studies department Emma Perez suggests criticism of Churchill is a "neo-con test case for academic purges."

Bush Demands That Syria Leave Lebanon

2005-03-02T17:15:00.000-08:00

Yahoo News:
President Bush on Wednesday demanded in blunt terms that Syria get out of Lebanon, saying the free world is in agreement that Damascus' authority over the political affairs of its neighbor must end now.

He applauded the strong message sent to Syria when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier held a joint news conference on London on Tuesday.

"Both of them stood up and said loud and clear to Syria, `You get your troops and your secret services out of Lebanon so that good democracy has a chance to flourish," Bush said during an appearance at a community college in Maryland to tout his job training programs.

The world, Bush said, "is speaking with one voice when it comes to making sure that democracy has a chance to flourish in Lebanon."

The president's words, taken with those from Rice and others in the Bush administration this week, amount to the strongest pressure to date on Syria from Washington.

"There's always hope that this might not work."

2005-03-02T17:11:00.000-08:00

James Taranto has the Daily Show transcript of former Clinton aide Nancy Soderberg:

Stewart: Do you think they're the guys to--do they understand what they've unleashed? Because at a certain point, I almost feel like, if they had just come out at the very beginning and said, "Here's my plan: I'm going to invade Iraq. We'll get rid of a bad guy because that will drain the swamp"--if they hadn't done the whole "nuclear cloud," you know, if they hadn't scared the pants off of everybody, and just said straight up, honestly, what was going on, I think I'd almost--I'd have no cognitive dissonance, no mixed feelings.

Soderberg: The truth always helps in these things, I have to say. But I think that there is also going on in the Middle East peace process--they may well have a chance to do a historic deal with the Palestinians and the Israelis. These guys could really pull off a whole--

Stewart: This could be unbelievable!

Soderberg:---series of Nobel Peace Prizes here, which--it may well work. I think that, um, it's--

Stewart: [buries head in hands] Oh my God! [audience laughter] He's got, you know, here's--

Soderberg: It's scary for Democrats, I have to say.

Stewart: He's gonna be a great--pretty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, "Reagan was nothing compared to this guy." Like, my kid's gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it.

Soderberg: Well, there's still Iran and North Korea, don't forget. There's hope for the rest of us.

Stewart: [crossing fingers] Iran and North Korea, that's true, that is true [audience laughter]. No, it's--it is--I absolutely agree with you, this is--this is the most difficult thing for me to--because, I think, I don't care for the tactics, I don't care for this, the weird arrogance, the setting up. But I gotta say, I haven't seen results like this ever in that region.

Soderberg: Well wait. It hasn't actually gotten very far. I mean, we've had--

Stewart: Oh, I'm shallow! I'm very shallow!

Soderberg: There's always hope that this might not work.

The video.

Update:
Jonah Goldberg gets an email:

The common complaint of Stewart and the anti-hygiene anti-war crowd seems to be that the freedom of Iraqis was an after the fact rationalization for the war. It got me thinking, so I did some heavy research and was quite surprised to learn that the military operation was not named “Operation Iraqi WMD”! Apparently it was called—get this!—Operation Iraqi Freedom.

OpinionJournal:
March 2
March 8
March 9

Lebanon 'victory' spurs Syrians to demand a voice

2005-03-02T11:56:00.000-08:00

The Washington Times:
Demonstrations that brought down the government of neighboring Lebanon on Monday inspired Syria's intellectuals and activists to issue new calls yesterday for greater political participation in their own country -- a nation known for its strict limits on dissent.

"What happened [in Lebanon] was a huge victory not only for the Lebanese people, but for the people of this region," said Wael Sawah, a Syrian political analyst and activist. "This is the first time a Cabinet resigns under popular pressure."

Michel Kilo, another prominent Syrian opposition figure, said that the Lebanese protests could have a ripple effect in Syria. "The people here will want a bigger role and will start demanding their rights more," Mr. Kilo said.

From The Corner

2005-03-01T21:28:00.000-08:00

LOU DOBBS [Jonah Goldberg]
I'm a fairly devoted "Special Report with Brit Hume" watcher so I normally don't catch much on the other channels at 6:00 O'Clock EST (including re-runs of the Simpsons). But my hotel yesterday didn't have Fox News so I watched Lou Dobbs' CNN show at 6:00 O'Clock. Wow. I'd heard about his anti-free trade stuff and all that. But if last night's show was typical, than Dobbs is vastly -- vastly -- more ideologically loaded than Hume is. In fact, Dobbs is closer to Bill O'Reilly than to Brit Hume. It was nonstop editorializing straight to the camera. All of these folks who are rending their clothes and gnashing their teeth over Hume's reading -- or misreading -- of an FDR quote should flip channels if what they're really angry about is ideologically loaded commentary passing itself off as news.

SAY GOODNIGHT, DAN [Tim Graham]
As Dan Rather drones through his last full week as CBS anchor, the MRC's long-memory brigade has assembled a nice summary of his most outrageous and/or humorous quotes for the occasion. Watch him welcome the Republican takeover in 1995: “The new Republican majority in Congress took a big step today on its legislative agenda to demolish or damage government aid programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor.” (And don't miss Rather's 1984 bit on how the platform showed Walter Mondale was marching the Democratic party toward the right wing.)

Saddam happy Spain caved in to terrorism

2005-03-01T20:07:00.000-08:00

From LittleGreenFootballs: The life of an imprisoned ex-dictator is normally devoid of happiness. But a ray of sunshine recently illuminated Saddam Hussein’s jail cell, when he learned that Spain had caved in to terrorism.

Saddam last met his defence counsel in December and conveyed his greetings to all “free people” of the world “and especially to France and Germany,” which were staunch opponents of the war that toppled him, Khassawneh said.
Saddam voiced his joy during the four and a half hour meeting when he was told Spain’s new government had left the US-led military coalition in Iraq.
“He was very happy to know that Spanish forces had left Iraq,” Khassawneh said.

"Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks' nightmare scenario--it's their plan."

2005-02-28T23:12:00.000-08:00

Liberal blogger Joshua Micah Marshall in April 2003: [The] invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints. In February, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq, the United States would "deal with" Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Meanwhile, neoconservative journalists have been channeling the administration's thinking. Late last month, The Weekly Standard's Jeffrey Bell reported that the administration has in mind a "world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism ... a war of such reach and magnitude [that] the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future."

In short, the administration is trying to roll the table--to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism.... Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments--or, failing that, U.S. troops--rule the entire Middle East.

...

Like any group of permanent Washington revolutionaries fueled by visions of a righteous cause, the neocons long ago decided that criticism from the establishment isn't a reason for self-doubt but the surest sign that they're on the right track. But their confidence also comes from the curious fact that much of what could go awry with their plan will also serve to advance it. A full-scale confrontation between the United States and political Islam, they believe, is inevitable, so why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs?

The Academy Awards

2005-02-28T22:09:00.000-08:00

Jonathan V Last:
The 77th Academy Awards will go down in history as the meanest Oscars ever, the one where Hollywood finally admitted that the artists who don't appear on the cover of Us Weekly don't actually matter. When I first saw that all of the nominees save the actors where pushed onto the stage together to cut their time and dignity, I had trouble believing that even Hollywood could be that cruel.

A new poll by John Zogby: 4 in 10 Democrats watch the Oscars while only 1 in 8 Republicans do. There's something to these numbers.

Oscar predictions:
Once again, the HSX predictions for the Oscars were perfect. Every year the HSX issues options on 8 Oscar categories and every year the market predicts with near perfection who the winners are. This year the HSX was 8 for 8.

Theo Van Gogh Forgotten on Oscar Night: not a word was said about the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. You wonder if the organizers even discussed it—and if they did, what excuse was used to avoid the subject.

What Is Going On In the Blogosphere?

2005-02-28T21:22:00.000-08:00

Belgravia Dispatch: Juan Cole has, don seatbelts please, written the phrase "positive development" (ya gotta scroll to the bottom to spot this rarest of birds). Matthew Yglesias is wondering why, er, conservatives aren't more excited about Egypt. There's always something to complain about with regard to those dastardly Bushies, isn't there? They're not, you know, happy enough about what Bush has wrought in Egypt (though doubtless John 'palsy walsy with Hosni' Kerry must be duly gratified, eh?) That said Matt, to his credit, is calling developments underway in Egypt a real positive and at least a partial, mid-stream, vindication of Bush's democratization policies in the region. Even Atrios is forced to write something at least arguably positive re: Bush: "George Bush might actually be sincere in his new mission..."

The Making Of A 9/11 Republican

2005-02-28T19:38:00.000-08:00

Read the whole thing.

Cinnamon Stillwell: more than anything, it was the left's hypocrisy when it came to the war on terrorism that made me turn rightward after 9/11. I remember, back in my liberal days, being fiercely opposed to the Taliban and its brutal treatment of women. Even then, I felt that Afghanistan should immediately be liberated, as Malcolm X once said in another context, by any means necessary. But when it came time, it turned out that the left was mostly opposed to such liberation, whether of the Afghan people or of the Iraqis (especially if America and a Republican president were at the helm).

Indeed, liberals had become strangely conservative in their fierce attachment to the status quo. In contrast, the much-maligned neoconservatives (among whose ranks I count myself) and Bush had become the "radicals," bringing freedom and democracy to the despotic Middle East. Is it any wonder that in such a topsy-turvy world, I found myself in agreement with those I'd formerly denounced?

The war on terrorism is nothing more than the great struggle of our time, and, like the earlier ones against fascism and totalitarianism, we ignore it at our peril. Whether or not one accepts that we are engaged in a war, our enemies have declared it so. It took the horrors of 9/11 to awaken me to this reality, but for others, such lessons remain unlearned. For me, it was self-evident that in Islamic terrorism, America had found a nihilistic threat that sought to wipe out not only Western civilization but also civilization itself.

The Arab Street

2005-02-28T17:59:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hitchens:
The return of politics to Iraq has had many blissful secondary consequences, one of them apparently minor but nonetheless, I think, important. When was the last time you heard some glib pundit employing the phrase "The Arab Street"? I haven't actually done a Nexis search on this, but my strong impression is that the term has been, without any formal interment, laid to rest. And not a minute too soon, either.

In retrospect, it's difficult to decide precisely when this annoying expression began to expire, if only from diminishing returns. There was, first, the complete failure of the said "street" to detonate with rage when coalition forces first crossed the border of Iraq, as had been predicted (and one suspects privately hoped) by so many "experts." But one still continued to hear from commentators who conferred street-level potency on passing "insurgents." (I remember being aggressively assured by an interviewer on Al Franken's quasi-comedic Air America that Muqtada Sadr's "Mahdi Army" in Najaf was just the beginning of a new "Tet Offensive.") Mr. Sadr duly got a couple of seats in the recent Iraqi elections. And it was most obviously those elections that discredited the idea of ventriloquizing the Arab or Muslim populace or of conferring axiomatic authenticity on the loudest or hoarsest voice.

Mark Steyn: "I told you so"

2005-02-28T17:47:00.000-08:00

Mark Steyn: The Arabs' Berlin Wall has crumbled

Three years ago - April 6 2002, if you want to rummage through the old Spectators in the attic - I wrote: "The stability junkies in the EU, UN and elsewhere have, as usual, missed the point. The Middle East is too stable. So, if you had to pick only one regime to topple, why not Iraq? Once you've got rid of the ruling gang, it's the West's best shot at incubating a reasonably non-insane polity. That's why the unravelling of the Middle East has to start not in the West Bank but in Baghdad."

I don't like to say I told you so. But, actually, I do like to say I told you so.

NY Times Endorses Bush Agenda, Says Democracy Promotion Worth The Sacrifice

2005-02-28T13:52:00.000-08:00

...on January 13, 1988.

David Adsednik: I think that the NYT editorial from back in '88 demonstrates both that democracy promotion is a strategy with true bi-partisan potential and that the current generation of editors at the NYT has sadly fallen away from the idealism of not all that long ago.

But I haven't lost faith. The more purple fingers there are in Iraq and across the Middle East, the closer we come to a democratic revolution on West 43rd Street.

Canada insists on missile consultation

2005-02-28T09:39:00.000-08:00

From the Seattle Post Intelligencer:

A day after opting out of the U.S. ballistic missile defense shield, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin reiterated Friday that Washington must get permission from Ottawa before firing on any incoming missiles over Canada. ...

Martin made his comments to reporters as the fallout from Canada’s decision to not take part in the development and operation of President Bush’s nascent anti-ballistic missile shield continued to roil relations between with Canada.

Stockwell Day, the Conservative Party’s foreign affairs critic, laughed off Martin’s demand that Washington would have to alert Ottawa before taking out an incoming missile.

"These missiles are coming in at 4 kilometers ( 2.5 miles) a second, and if the president calls the 1-800 line and gets: 'Press 1 if you want English, press 2 if you want French, press 0 if nobody’s there ...' I mean, it's crazy."

Problems in Europe

2005-02-28T07:02:00.000-08:00

Putting the fear of God into Holland
Opacity is an EU hallmark. Its Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia commissioned a report to analyse who was behind a wave of anti-Semitic attacks in 2002. When it found that most of the perpetrators were young Muslims of Arab descent, and "were only seldom from the extreme-right milieu", its methodology was questioned and it was shelved. Not much stomach for debate there.

...

Is Europe giving way to blackmail? The question was raised in Germany last month by an article in Die Welt, the country's most heavyweight paper, by Mathias Dúpfner, head of the big Axel Springer publishing group. He titled it Europe — Thy Name Is Cowardice. He said that a crusade is under way "by fanatic Muslims, focused on civilians, directed against our free, open western societies" that is set upon the "utter destruction" of western civilisation. This enemy, he said, was spurred on by "tolerance" and "accommodation", which were taken as signs of weakness. Europe's supine response, he said, was on a par with the appeasement of Hitler.

A Swedish Dilemma
Toward the end of the Social Democratic reign that ran uninterrupted from 1932 to 1976, Sweden not only ranked among the world's handful of richest countries but also provided the world's most lavish welfare state. It married solidarity to prosperity. In the prevailing Keynesian climate, Swedes assumed that the solidarity created the prosperity. The state was generous with workers, who spent their money and kept the economy pumped up. Today, people are inclined to think the causality runs in the other direction. Johan Norberg, the young new-economy guru of Timbro Institute in Stockholm, notes that if Sweden were somehow to leave the E.U. and join the United States, "we would be the poorest state in America."

Europe's rising class of believers: Muslims
Though Muslims make up only 3 percent of the British population, more people attend Friday prayers than go to Sunday church, a recent survey found.

Infighting on the Left

2005-02-28T06:53:00.000-08:00

Democracy Guy on DailyKos forgetting 9/11:
And thus, in stark relief, is revealed the problem in the Democratic Party today. Some anonymous guy takes whatever time it took to craft some big answer to a big question about the Democratic Party, and simply forgets that September 11 happened. The guy can't even bring himself to type the characters "9/11", prefering to call it some "reemergence of national security," as if it just oozed out of the electorate like gay marriage or prescription drug coverage.

"My political party is so fucked."

Jeff Jarvis responds to Oliver Willis: the way the Democrats are going right now, they're doing a fine job of destroying themselves by losing elections -- and I don't just mean the White House -- and alienating fellow Democrats like me and fence-sitting Republicans with your kind of venemous orthodoxy and insult.

"The reason Jeff raises such ire on the left is that he's a reliable source for the right in getting a Democrat to bash Democrats. A similar dynamic exists with Mickey Kaus, The New Republic, and Joe Lieberman."

Thanks, Oliver. I'd say that's good company. I disagree with them on many issues, but I do respect them because they have a mature and sensible view of politics and responsibility and the nation.

And some advice for Oliver Willis concerning his "Resign Brit Hume" banner:

"I think you've gotten yourself into a sort of pickle with this top-posted banner and thread. Because frankly, I don't believe there is a chance in hell that Hume will resign over this (nor do I think he should, but that's not the point of my post.) So what has to eventually happen is, the banner will have to come down, leaving you with nothing to show for your indignity. It's kind of like having a Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker on your car...you can either leave it up and call attention to your loss, or you can admit your loss to yourself and take it off."

"I watched Brit last night....he seems to be doing ok, weathering the "storm" as it were.
Perhaps you should set your sights a bit lower...you know, try to run a republican high school newspaper editor out of office or something...."

A Mideast Makeover?

2005-02-28T06:48:00.000-08:00

Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post:

Virtually no one in Washington expected such a snowballing of events following Iraq's elections. Not many yet believe that they will lead to real democracy in Egypt, Lebanon or Syria anytime soon. But it is a fact of history that the collapse of a rotted political order usually happens quickly, and takes most of the experts by surprise. In early 1989 I surveyed a panoply of West German analysts about the chances that the then-incipient and barely noticed unrest in Eastern Europe could lead to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. None thought it possible; most laughed at me for asking the question.

If a Middle East transformation begins to gather momentum, it probably will be more messy, and the results more ambiguous, than those European revolutions. It also won't be entirely Bush's creation: The tinder for ignition has been gathering around the stagnant and corrupt autocracies of the Middle East for years. Still, less than two years after Saddam Hussein was deposed, the fact is that Arabs are marching for freedom and shouting slogans against tyrants in the streets of Beirut and Cairo -- and regimes that have endured for decades are visibly tottering. Those who claimed that U.S. intervention could never produce such events have reason to reconsider.

Update:

The "D" word

Update II:

"Gorgeous women risking life and limb for democracy and independence? Be still my heart! What could be hotter than that?"

Jim Geraghty: What the U.S. gains from a free and independent Lebanon.

DNC chair Dean in Kansas

2005-02-28T06:32:00.000-08:00

Mickey Kaus:

"This is a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good."
--Howard Dean

"I feel like he could have gone even stronger with his language."
--Katherine Dessert, a student and preschool teacher in the audience.

P.S.: Does Dean now come with such built-in expectations in the Righteous Anti-GOP Fury department that he inevitably fails to meet them, with the result that he is actually unable to rally the hard-core faithful he supposedly had the unique ability to rally?

Homophobia on the Left

2005-02-27T09:08:00.000-08:00

Anderew Sullivan on Gannon-Guckert: I haven't written about it because I agree completely with Glenn. The substantive case against Gannon is trivial; the irrelevant case against him (the one that's fueled this story) is that he's gay, has allegedly been (or still may be) a prostitute, and may not agree with everything the gay left believes (although I agree with David Corn that the evidence that Gannon has written anything even remotely "anti-gay" is laughable). The real scandal is the blatant use of homophobic rhetoric by the self-appointed Savonarolas of homo-left-wingery. It's an Animal Farm moment: the difference between a fanatic on the gay left and a fanatic on the religious right is harder and harder to discern. Just ask yourself: if a Catholic conservative blogger had found out that a liberal-leaning pseudo-pundit/reporter was a gay sex worker, had outed the guy as gay and a "hooker," published pictures of the guy naked, and demanded a response from a Democratic administration, do you think gay rights groups would be silent? They'd rightly be outraged. But the left can get away with anything, can't they? Especially homophobia.

The Tipping Point

2005-02-26T21:41:00.000-08:00

Michael Barone:
In the left-wing Guardian, Martin Kettle reassures his readers that the Iraq war was "a reckless, provocative, dangerous, lawless piece of unilateral arrogance" --the usual stuff. "But," he concedes, "it has nevertheless brought forth a desirable outcome which would not have been achieved at all, or so quickly, by the means that the critics advocated, right though they were in most respects."

And minds are changing in the United States. On Nightline, the New York Times's Thomas Friedman and, with caveats, the New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell agreed that the Iraqi election was a "tipping point" (the title of one of Gladwell's books) and declined Ted Koppel's invitation to say that things could easily tip back the other way. In the most recent Foreign Affairs , Yale's John Lewis Gaddis credited George W. Bush with "the most sweeping redesign of U.S. grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt," criticized Bush's implementation of that strategy in measured tones, and called for a "renewed strategic bipartisanship." One Democrat so inclined is the party's most likely 2008 nominee, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. She voted for the Iraq war and has not wavered in her support--she avoided voting for the $87 billion before voting against it. She has kept clear of the Michael Moore left and its shrill denunciations of Bush and has kept her criticisms well within the bounds of normal partisan discourse. "Where we stand right now, there can be no doubt that it is not in America's interests for the Iraqi government, the experiment in freedom and democracy, to fail," she said on Meet the Press February 20. "So I hope that Americans understand that and that we will have as united a front as is possible in our country at this time to keep our troops safe, make sure they have everything they need, and try to support this new Iraqi government." Moveon.org may want to keep shrieking about weapons of mass destruction, but Senator Clinton is moving on.

George W. Bush gambled that actions can change minds. So far, he's winning.

Could George W. Bush Be Right?

2005-02-24T00:15:00.000-08:00

Der Spiegel:
Quick quiz. He was re-elected as president of the United States despite being largely disliked in the world -- particularly in Europe. The Europeans considered him to be a war-mongerer and liked to accuse him of allowing his deep religious beliefs to become the motor behind his foreign policy. Easy right?

Actually, the answer isn't as obvious as it might seem. President Ronald Reagan's visit to Berlin in 1987 was, in many respects, very similar to President George W. Bush's visit to Mainz on Wednesday. Like Bush's visit, Reagan's trip was likewise accompanied by unprecedented security precautions. A handpicked crowd cheered Reagan in front of the Brandenburg Gate while large parts of the Berlin subway system were shut down. And the Germany Reagan was traveling in, much like today's Germany, was very skeptical of the American president and his foreign policy. When Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate -- and the Berlin Wall -- and demanded that Gorbachev "tear down this Wall," he was lampooned the next day on the editorial pages. He is a dreamer, wrote commentators. Realpolitik looks different.

But history has shown that it wasn't Reagan who was the dreamer as he voiced his demand. Rather, it was German politicians who were lacking in imagination -- a group who in 1987 couldn't imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany. Those who spoke of reunification were labelled as nationalists and the entire German left was completely uninterested in a unified Germany.

...

It was difficult not to cringe during Reagan's speech in 1987. He didn't leave a single Berlin cliché out of his script. At the end of it, most experts agreed that his demand for the removal of the Wall was inopportune, utopian and crazy.

Yet three years later, East Germany had disappeared from the map. Gorbachev had a lot to do with it, but it was the East Germans who played the larger role. When analysts are confronted by real people, amazing things can happen. And maybe history can repeat itself. Maybe the people of Syria, Iran or Jordan will get the idea in their heads to free themselves from their oppressive regimes just as the East Germans did. When the voter turnout in Iraq recently exceeded that of many Western nations, the chorus of critique from Iraq alarmists was, at least for a couple of days, quieted. Just as quiet as the chorus of Germany experts on the night of Nov. 9, 1989 when the Wall fell.

Just a thought for Old Europe to chew on: Bush might be right, just like Reagan was then.

Not Much Left

2005-02-23T15:28:00.000-08:00

The New Republic's Martin Peretz:
I think it was John Kenneth Galbraith, speaking in the early 1960s, the high point of post-New Deal liberalism, who pronounced conservatism dead. Conservatism, he said, was "bookless," a characteristic Galbraithian, which is to say Olympian, verdict. Without books, there are no ideas. And it is true: American conservatism was, at the time, a congeries of cranky prejudices, a closed church with an archaic doctrine proclaimed by spoiled swells.

At this point in history, it is liberalism upon which such judgments are rendered. And understandably so. It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying. The most penetrating thinker of the old liberalism, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, is virtually unknown in the circles within which he once spoke and listened, perhaps because he held a gloomy view of human nature. However gripping his illuminations, however much they may have been validated by history, liberals have no patience for such pessimism. So who has replaced Niebuhr, the once-commanding tribune to both town and gown? It's as if no one even tries to fill the vacuum. Here and there, of course, a university personage appears to assert a small didactic point and proves it with a vast and intricate academic apparatus. In any case, it is the apparatus that is designed to persuade, not the idea.

Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture? Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire? Whose books and articles are read and passed around? There's no one, really. What's left is the laundry list: the catalogue of programs (some dubious, some not) that Republicans aren't funding, and the blogs, with their daily panic dose about how the Bush administration is ruining the country.

Europe is also making the disenchanting journey from social democracy, but via a different route. Its elites had not foreseen that a virtually unchecked Muslim immigration might hijack the welfare state and poison the postwar culture of relative tolerance that supported its politics. To the contrary, Europe's leftist elites lulled the electorates into a false feeling of security that the new arrivals were simply doing the work that unprecedented low European birth rates were leaving undone. No social or cultural costs were to be incurred. Transaction closed. Well, it was not quite so simple. And, while the workforce still needs more workers, the economies of Europe have been dragged down by social guarantees to large families who do not always have a wage-earner in the house. So, even in the morally self-satisfied Scandinavian and Low Countries, the assuring left-wing bromides are no longer believed.

The conflict between right and left in the United States is different. What animates American conservatism is the future of the regulatory state and the trajectory of federalism. The conservatives have not themselves agreed on how far they want to retract either regulation or the authority of the national government. These are not axiomatic questions for them, as can be seen by their determined and contravening success last week in empowering not the states against Washington but Washington against the states in the area of tort law. As Jeffrey Rosen has pointed out in these pages, many of these issues will be fought out in the courts. But not all. So a great national debate will not be avoided.

Liberals have reflexes on these matters, and these reflexes put them in a defensive posture. But they have not yet conducted an honest internal conversation that assumes from the start that the very nature of the country has changed since the great New Deal reckoning. Surely there are some matters on which the regulatory state can relax. Doubtless also there are others that can revert to the states.

Peter Beinart has argued, also in these pages ("A Fighting Faith," December 13, 2004), the case for a vast national and international mobilization against Islamic fanaticism and Arab terrorism. It is typologically the same people who wanted the United States to let communism triumph--in postwar Italy and Greece, in mid-cold war France and late-cold war Portugal--who object to U.S. efforts right now in the Middle East. You hear the schadenfreude in their voices--you read it in their words--at our troubles in Iraq. For months, liberals have been peddling one disaster scenario after another, one contradictory fact somehow reinforcing another, hoping now against hope that their gloomy visions will come true.

I happen to believe that they won't. This will not curb the liberal complaint. That complaint is not a matter of circumstance. It is a permanent affliction of the liberal mind. It is not a symptom; it is a condition. And it is a condition related to the desperate hopes liberals have vested in the United Nations. That is their lodestone. But the lodestone does not perform. It is not a magnet for the good. It performs the magic of the wicked. It is corrupt, it is pompous, it is shackled to tyrants and cynics. It does not recognize a genocide when the genocide is seen and understood by all. Liberalism now needs to be liberated from many of its own illusions and delusions. Let's hope we still have the strength.

"The Berlin Wall has fallen"

2005-02-23T00:19:00.000-08:00

From the Washington Post:

The leader of this Lebanese intifada [for independence from Syria] is Walid Jumblatt, the patriarch of the Druze Muslim community and, until recently, a man who accommodated Syria's occupation. But something snapped for Jumblatt last year, when the Syrians overruled the Lebanese constitution and forced the reelection of their front man in Lebanon, President Emile Lahoud. The old slogans about Arab nationalism turned to ashes in Jumblatt's mouth, and he and Hariri openly began to defy Damascus...

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

On political amnesia

2005-02-20T19:45:00.000-08:00

Norman Geras: those who spoke in support of the Iraq war did not speak only of WMD and the terrorist threat; they also spoke of the human rights dimension and of regime change for democratization.

President George Bush in October 2002:
Some worry that a change of leadership in Iraq could create instability and make the situation worse. The situation could hardly get worse, for world security and for the people of Iraq. The lives of Iraqi citizens would improve dramatically if Saddam Hussein were no longer in power, just as the lives of Afghanistan's citizens improved after the Taliban. The dictator of Iraq is a student of Stalin, using murder as a tool of terror and control, within his own cabinet, within his own army, and even within his own family.

On Saddam Hussein's orders, opponents have been decapitated, wives and mothers of political opponents have been systematically raped as a method of intimidation, and political prisoners have been forced to watch their own children being tortured.

America believes that all people are entitled to hope and human rights, to the non-negotiable demands of human dignity. People everywhere prefer freedom to slavery; prosperity to squalor; self-government to the rule of terror and torture. America is a friend to the people of Iraq. Our demands are directed only at the regime that enslaves them and threatens us. When these demands are met, the first and greatest benefit will come to Iraqi men, women and children. The oppression of Kurds, Assyrians, Turkomans, Shi'a, Sunnis and others will be lifted. The long captivity of Iraq will end, and an era of new hope will begin.

Congressional Resoluton on Iraq:
Whereas the Iraq Liberation Act (Public Law 105-338) expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime;

The Bike Path Left

2005-02-18T17:33:00.000-08:00

Jonah Goldberg: When Howard Dean was still on top of the world looking down on the Democratic presidential nomination, the indispensable columnist Mark Steyn, writing in the Wall Street Journal, dubbed the good doctor the figurehead of the "bike path left."

This was a reference to Dean's decision to leave the Episcopal Church because his parish had opposed his plan to build a local bike path. As Steyn noted, what made this controversy remarkable, considering the recent dust-ups within the Anglican community, was that this was not in fact a gay bike path, nor a path one biked on the way to a gay marriage. No, this was just an ordinary bike path, and, for all the theological issues involved in the controversy, Dean's church might just as well have been a McDonald's or a Jiffy Lube. It was just, in Dean's words, a "big fight." "I was fighting to have public access to the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard."

Steyn contrasted Dean's readiness to rumble about a bike path with his more leisurely attitude toward war. When Saddam was captured, Dean had said, "I suppose that's a good thing." When the butchers Uday and Qusay were killed in a raid, Dean said, "The ends don't justify the means." About Osama bin Laden, Dean explained in 2003, "I don't think it makes a lot of difference" if he's tried in the Hague or in the place where he orchestrated the murder of thousands of Americans. Asked if the Hague would be good for Saddam, too, Dean airily replied, "Suits me fine."

In short, about the war on terror Dean was dismissively blasé. About bike paths he was a pit bull.

The Inventor of Modern Conservatism

2005-02-10T03:57:00.000-08:00

David Gelernter in The Weekly Standard:
Benjamin Disraeli--Twice Prime minister of Great Britain, romantic novelist, inventor of modern conservatism--was a neocon in the plain sense of the word, a "new conservative" who began his career on the left. Conservative thinking dates to the dawn of organized society, but modern conservatism--a mass movement, a philosophy not for aristocrats and the rich but for everybody--was Disraeli's creation. That modern conservatism should have been invented by a 19th-century neocon is thought provoking. More surprising: His redefinition of conservatism is still fresh, and his political philosophy has never been more apt.
Read more.

Roemer warns Democrats

2005-02-08T17:50:00.000-08:00

AP:
Tim Roemer, the only remaining opponent of Howard Dean in the race to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said Monday he's bowing out of the race - but he offered a warning to Democrats.

Dean, the former presidential candidate and governor of Vermont, is expected to win the DNC chairmanship at the election Feb. 12.

Roemer, a former congressman from Indiana and a member of the Sept. 11 commission, said Democrats must be more inclusive in their outreach to fast-growing parts of the country.

"I got into this race five weeks ago to talk about the devastating loss we experienced in November," Roemer said in an interview. "It was not about 60,000 votes in Ohio. It was about losing 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties in the country. If that's a trend in business or politics you're in trouble."

Republicans are in the strongest position they've been in since the early 20th century, Roemer said.

Roemer, who said top Democrats in Congress encouraged him to enter the chairman's race, said he wants to strengthen Democrats' position on national security.

"If there's one reason Senator Kerry lost the presidential race, it was because he failed to make the American people feel safer," Roemer said, adding that he also wanted to encourage talk within the party about developing a stronger position on values.

Rice on a Roll

2005-02-07T15:38:00.000-08:00

Kathryn Jean Lopez on Condi Rice:
Disses Europe on European soil. Ceasefire in the Middle East. Predictss the Super Bowl winning spread: From NYTimes piece written before the game: "she has told aides that the New England Patriots will win by 3 points."

Condoleezza Rice brings morality to realpolitik

2005-02-05T20:49:00.000-08:00

The Telegraph: the Bush Administration is seeking to tilt the balance of power towards freedom. Contrast this with the EU, fêting Robert Mugabe, withdrawing its support from anti-Castro dissidents, seeking accommodation with the Iranian ayatollahs.

When Europeans talk of "stability" and "constructive engagement", what they often mean is doing deals with dictators. A case can, of course, be made for such an approach. But, whatever else it is, it is not ethical. Miss Rice, by contrast, talks without embarrassment about exporting liberty.

"There cannot be an absence of moral content in American foreign policy," she says. "Europeans giggle at this, but we are not European, we are American, and we have different principles."

Bush and Sharansky

2005-02-05T15:42:00.000-08:00

The Economist:
Mr Bush loves “The Case for Democracy” for the simple reason that he likes what it has to say. “I want you to read a book,” he told John Dickerson of Time magazine. “It will give you a sense of what I'm talking about.” Conspiracy theorists, not least in Israel, are already tracing the way that the evil Likudniks spread their influence. (A clue: Mr Sharansky ran into Dick Cheney at an American Enterprise Institute retreat in Beaver Creek, Colorado in June 2002, and had a long conversation with him. A few days later Mr Bush gave a speech telling the Palestinians that they needed to embrace democracy.) But this is less a case of presidential manipulation than of two minds thinking alike. Mr Sharansky is not so much Mr Bush's guru as his voice.

Mr Sharansky's message comes down to three points. First, “realpolitik” is bankrupt. America cannot go on coddling tyrannical regimes like Saudi Arabia because those regimes invariably try to buy stability at home by exporting hatred abroad. Second, democracy is the best insurance against aggression. Third, the world really is divided between good and evil.

There are few things that irritate foreign-policy types more about Mr Bush than his Manichean view of the world. His infatuation with Mr Sharansky suggests that he is not likely to be any more “sophisticated” in his second term. Mr Sharansky not only sees the world in black and white terms—good versus evil and free societies versus “fear societies”, with a bunch of “realists” dithering in the middle. He has also earned a right to such Manicheanism during his heroic years as a Soviet dissident.

The Bush-Sharansky “freedom doctrine” has come under heavy fire since Mr Bush's inaugural address (several passages in the address echoed the book almost word for word). In most cases, the criticisms say more about the critics. For instance, the Michael Moore crowd claim that Mr Bush doesn't really believe any of this claptrap about democracy—a charge that seems absurd, given the blood and treasure America has spent bringing elections to Afghanistan and Iraq. Meanwhile, a growing army of nouveaux Kissingerians mutter that democracy is not really that important. That is a hard charge to sustain after last Sunday's vote in Iraq. Still others worry that Mr Bush is selective in his targets, picking on Iran but not North Korea. Yet isn't politics the language of priorities? The fact that you can't do something everywhere is no reason to stop trying it somewhere.

Europe's dash for growth

2005-02-05T14:47:00.000-08:00

The Economist on Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission:
Mr Barroso is trying to boil his programme down to something like the famous Clintonian slogan: “it's the economy, stupid.” Such candour is not allowed in official documents, however, so the programme that Mr Barroso presented on February 2nd was soporifically entitled “A partnership for growth and jobs”. But its central message was clear. The European Union's biggest problem is slow growth, and the Barroso commission wants to do something about it.

For a political leader to make creating prosperity his top priority would usually be utterly banal. But this is the EU, where Mr Barroso's statements have been greeted with deep suspicion. The left fear that he is intent on dismantling EU social and environmental legislation. Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, head of the party of European Socialists and a former Danish prime minister, even used the ultimate Brussels boo-word, accusing Mr Barroso of promoting a “neo-conservative” economic agenda.

...

If all this can be taken at face value, it sounds good. But while there is no doubting the determination of the Barroso team to breathe new life into the European economy, most of what needs to be done is sadly not in their power. Structural reforms to Europe's welfare states and deregulation of labour markets remain largely the province of national governments. Still, if the commission shows more restraint when exercising its formidable powers over social, environmental and industrial legislation, it would at least be following the sage advice given to new doctors: “first, do no harm.”

A Suicidal Selection

2005-02-04T06:01:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Chait:
A few weeks ago, when former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean declared his intention to run for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, news reports had the general tone of "Get this, that crazy scream guy is back and he wants to run the party." Now, a week before the vote, his victory is a fait accompli. How did this happen? Are Democrats suicidally crazy?

Wait. That's too easy. Let me rephrase the question. Why are Democrats suicidally crazy?

The conventional rap against Dean as DNC chairman is essentially the same as the conventional rap against him as presidential candidate a year ago. Namely, he reinforces all the party's weaknesses. Democrats need to appeal to culturally traditional voters in the Midwest and border states who worry about the party's commitment to national security. Dean, with his intense secularism, arrogant style, throngs of high-profile counterculture supporters and association with the peace movement, is the precise opposite of the image Democrats want to send out.

The conventional rap is completely right. But, in a way, Dean is even less suited to run the DNC than he is to run for president.

Iraq and Nicaragua

2005-02-04T05:59:00.000-08:00

Charles Krauthammer:
Iraqis turned out to vote in great numbers, with great enthusiasm and determination. Surprise. The media have not been as surprised, noted a friend of mine, since the Nicaraguans turned out in their 1990 election to kick out the Sandinistas.

These two elections were 15 years apart, but the herd mentality of the liberal establishment never changes. They were shocked when those revolutionary darlings in Managua, magnet for long-haired Western "sandalistas" on revolutionary holiday, lost a free election -- to the candidate supported by the contras.

The liberal cliche of the time was that Third World people care more about food than about freedom. This kind of contempt for the political and spiritual dignity of people who live in different circumstances never goes away. It simply gets applied serially to different sets of patronized foreigners.

Beinart Book Deal

2005-02-04T02:22:00.000-08:00

New York Observer: In December, New Republic editor Peter Beinart responded to John Kerry’s defeat with "A Fighting Faith," a 6,000-word manifesto on the future of the American left. Now Mr. Beinart will be stepping aside to spend the next eight months expanding his theory of New Liberalism into a book for HarperCollins—for an advance in the mid–six figures.

Mr. Beinart plans to write his manuscript from the peaceful setting of the Brookings Institution, where he will be a guest scholar. New Republic executive editor J. Peter Scoblic, who has been at the magazine less than two years, will take over as editor, with Mr. Beinart dropping by the offices two mornings a week to stay in touch.

Strain between Mr. Beinart and minority owner and editor in chief Martin Peretz had been visible during election season, with the hawkish Mr. Peretz less willing than Mr. Beinart to blame the Bush administration for cooking the evidence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But Mr. Beinart said that he plans to return to his post by Labor Day.

Mr. Beinart’s goals for the book, which is due out in 2006, are hardly modest. In his essay, he wrote of the need to wrest liberalism from the soft-on-terror likes of Michael Moore and refocus the Democratic Party on national security.

"The key things I want to try to argue are, first of all, I don’t think George W. Bush and the quote-unquote neocons are true heirs to the Cold War liberal tradition that I believe is the right tradition for Americans to connect with," Mr. Beinart said. "The idea is that through a reorientation of liberalism toward that idea, through this fight against totalitarian Islam, liberalism can achieve its fullest ideals."

James Tiberius Kirk, Neocon

2005-02-03T22:50:00.000-08:00

Paul Cantor:
"Star Trek provides a perfect reflection of the paradoxes of America's foreign policy--the non-democratic imposition of democracy around the world. The Enterprise was out to make the galaxy safe for democracy--and it would destroy any civilization that stood in its way. Gene Roddenberry's message was clear: woe to any planet not ruled by a liberal democrat."

State of the Union 2005

2005-02-03T10:03:00.000-08:00

The State of the Union Address, covered by Hardball.

Democratic SOTU Response

2005-02-03T01:09:00.000-08:00

Brendan Loy:
Quote of the day, from Andrew Sullivan on CNN: "Once again, the Democrats showed how incredibly lame they are, how vapid their arguments are."

Just One Minute on Pelosi:
I found her botox to be distracting, but eventually realized that it was not a bug, it was a feature, since the words coming out of her mouth made no sense. "We must reinvigorate the Middle East peace process..." Hello? Elections, Palestine, Iraq? Can you hear me now?

Dave Adesnik:
Don't the Democrats have something better to offer than telling us the Indians and Chinese are going to steal our jobs?

"Regional diplomacy must be intensified." There's a slogan that will be remembered for the ages.

Taking Kos Seriously

2005-02-02T23:57:00.000-08:00

Dean Barnett:
Many in the conservative blogosphere have been quick to label Kos a "moon bat" because of his unforgiving left-wing politics and his strident tone. Kos in turn dismisses these critics as "wing nuts." (Who says dialogue in the blogosphere isn't edifying?) This kind of juvenile give and take, however, obscures the vital fact that Moulitsas leads an influential movement, a movement whose influence is likely to grow even larger.
Whether or not that's good for the Democratic party remains to be seen.

Daiy Kos.

Soxblog.

What if Bush has been right about Iraq all along?

2005-02-01T13:57:00.000-08:00

From the Corner:
Jon Stewart, late in the Daily Show last night to Newsweek pundit Fareed Zakaria: "I’ve watched this thing unfold from the start and here’s the great fear that I have: What if Bush, the president, ours, has been right about this all along? I feel like my world view will not sustain itself and I may, and again I don’t know if I can physically do this, implode."

Mark Brown:
"If it turns out Bush was right all along, this is going to require some serious penance.
Maybe I'd have to vote Republican in 2008."

Voter Turnout falls 28% in Iraq; country more divided than ever

2005-01-31T23:37:00.000-08:00

BoiFromTroy:

News out of Iraq should send chills of distress around the world. As voting ended, turnout was estimated at 72% ... a 28% decline from voting in Iraq's last election. Furthermore, the unity that marked Iraq's 2002 election has been dissolved by the Bush Administration's divisive policies. The consensus which marked the last election has fallen apart to the point that one party may not even gain a majority.

What Was Teddy Thinking?

2005-01-31T20:03:00.000-08:00

Mickey Kaus:
It seems insane for Senator Ted Kennedy to give a high profile speech, three days before the Iraq election, publicly declaring the administration's Iraq policy a "catastrophic failure" and a "disaster." Even if that's what Kennedy thought, why would he put himself in the position where a successful election could make him look at least temporarily like a fool (as, apparently, it has)? ...It's not as if Kennedy differed all that much from Bush in the way of actual recommendations for the future. (Even his much-publicized "timetable" for withdrawing U.S. troops would be something we'd "negotiate;" his 2006 deadline is only a "goal.") ... And why would John Kerry go on Meet the Press even after the election's success was obvious and offer only the most grudging, complaint-drenched words of praise. ("It is significant that there is a vote in Iraq. But ...) Kerry's pathetic, but is he that pathetic? ... Fred Barnes offers an explanation for this seemingly bizarre behavior: Democrats think the lesson of Newt Gingrich and Clinton is that you have to ruthlessly criticize an incumbent if you want to win back Congress. Yet, as Barnes notes, this monotonic Democratic opposition is only further alienating the middle-class suburban voters whose support the party needs. Kennedy and (especially) Kerry must know this. It's January 2005, after all. Democrats can afford to jump on the "Yay--Iraqi Elections!" bandwagon now--they'd still have plenty of time to ruthlessly attack Bush in the 22 months before the next U.S. election ... Here's an alternative theory: Money. It used to be that at this stage, opposition party leaders would be making conciliatory noises in an attempt to please voters, and conservative or centrist noises in an attempt to please business lobbyists and PACs. But maybe the amount of money that can be raised over the Internet from Democratic true believers is now more important than PAC money. And if you want to draw a Dean-like share of this Web loot, you have to be ruthless in bashing Bush. Not all the consequences of Internet politics are benign. ... P.S.: Note that this theory explains Barbara Boxer's behavior too. ...

Update:
"You are old, Uncle Teddy"

Chairman Kim’s dissolving kingdom

2005-01-31T19:05:00.000-08:00

Times Online:
“It’s just like the Berlin Wall,” Pastor Douglas Shin, a Christian activist, said by telephone from Seoul. “The slow-motion exodus is the beginning of the end.”

In interviews for this article over many months, western policymakers, Chinese experts, North Korean exiles and human rights activists built up a picture of a tightly knit clan leadership in Pyongyang that is on the verge of collapse.

Some of those interviewed believe the “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong-il, has already lost his personal authority to a clique of generals and party cadres. Without any public announcement, governments from Tokyo to Washington are preparing for a change of regime.

Update 03/06:
From The Corner: Quirky?
Today's Post has a story on North Koreans living illegally in China which refers to the "quirky" rule of madman Kim Jong Il. Talk about understatement -- how about the "dour" regime of Stalin, the "enthusiastic" rhetoric of Hitler, or the "sincere" reform goals of the Khmer Rouge?

Bush statue in Baghdad?

2005-01-31T04:06:00.000-08:00

New York Post:
The man replacing the mayor of Baghdad — who was assassinated for his pro-American loyalties — says he is not worried about his ties to Washington.

In fact, he'd like to erect a monument to honor President Bush in the middle of the city.

"We will build a statue for Bush," said Ali Fadel, the former provincial council chairman. "He is the symbol of freedom."

Fadel's predecessor, Ali al-Haidari, was gunned down Jan. 4 when militants opened fire on his armor-covered BMW as it traveled with a three-car convoy.

Fadel said he received numerous threats on his life as the council chairman, and expects to get many more in his new post.

"My life is cheap," Fadel said. "Everything is cheap for my country."

Solidarity

2005-01-30T11:00:00.000-08:00

A reader emails Andrew Sullivan:
You have a pretty decent megaphone, I've got an idea for you and the rest of the blogosphere. Why not ask people to wear blue marker on their index fingers this week, as a sign of solidarity and a tip of the hat to the courage of the Iraqis today?

Update:
Ramesh Ponnuru: "I understand that some Republicans are thinking of having ink-stained fingers tonight as a gesture of solidarity with the Iraqis. I admire the intention, but I suspect it will come across the wrong way. It's not as though Republican congressmen have taken the risks that the Iraqi voters have. Liberal commentators and Democratic politicians will probably accuse the Republicans of trying to borrow some of those voters' moral authority. Is that a debate Republicans really want to waste time on?"

John J. Miller: "Ramesh: I like the purple-finger idea, which was suggested originally by Rep. Bobby Jindal. Why does it have to be a partisan thing? The Democrats can dip their digits, too."

PURPLE AND ORANGE [John J. Miller] Well, I'm okay with purple fingers. But then I wore an orange shirt all day on Dec. 26.

"The people have won."

2005-01-30T08:27:00.000-08:00

Iraq the Model:
How can I describe it!? Take my eyes and look through them my friends, you have supported the day of Iraq's freedom and today, Iraqis have proven that they're not going to disappoint their country or their friends.

Is there a bigger victory than this? I believe not.

I still recall the first group of comments that came to this blog 14 months ago when many of the readers asked "The Model?"… "Model for what?"
Take a look today to meet the model of courage and human desire to achieve freedom; people walking across the fire to cast their votes.

Could any model match this one!? Could any bravery match the Iraqis'!?
Let the remaining tyrants of the world learn the lesson from this day.

The media is reporting only explosions and suicide attacks that killed and injured many Iraqis so far but this hasn't stopped the Iraqis from marching towards their voting stations with more determination. Iraqis have truly raced the sun.

I walked forward to my station, cast my vote and then headed to the box, where I wanted to stand as long as I could, then I moved to mark my finger with ink, I dipped it deep as if I was poking the eyes of all the world's tyrants.
I put the paper in the box and with it, there were tears that I couldn't hold; I was trembling with joy and I felt like I wanted to hug the box but the supervisor smiled at me and said "brother, would you please move ahead, the people are waiting for their turn".

Yes brothers, proceed and fill the box!
These are stories that will be written on the brightest pages of history.

It was hard for us to leave the center but we were happy because we were sure that we will stand here in front of the box again and again and again.
Today, there's no voice louder than that of freedom.

No more confusion about what the people want, they have said their word and they said it loud and the world has got to respect and support the people's will.

God bless your brave steps sons of Iraq and God bless the defenders of freedom.