A hope fulfilled?

"A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn."
- Lyrics of "O Holy Night" by Placide Cappeau de Roqumaure (1808-1877)

As excited as I am about the candicy of Mr. Obama, the lyrical quotation above refers not to him or his progress in IA, but to the following fact: my first semester of law school is almost finished. And I can't possibly tell you how excited I am about that.

Though I plan on doing some writing for this blog over the winter holiday, I couldn't help but publish this op-ed piece from the NYT. This is the first time I've felt the drive to become involved in the primary process, rather than just waiting to see who surfaces in the Spring as the official DFL candidate. I'll write more later on my reasons for strongly supporting Obama over Clinton, but for now I'll leave you with the words of Frank Rich.

Oh, and the Des Moines Register reported yesterday that the latest poll in IA has Obama in the lead. One can only hope...

December 2, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Who’s Afraid of Barack Obama?

By FRANK RICH

JUST 24 hours after Hillary Clinton mowed down a skeptical Katie Couric with her certitude that she would win the Democratic nomination — “It will be me!” — her husband showed exactly how she could lose it.

By telling an Iowa audience on Tuesday night that he had opposed the Iraq war “from the beginning,” Bill Clinton committed a double pratfall. Not only did he refocus attention on his wife’s most hazardous issue, Iraq, just as it was receding as the nation’s Topic A, but he also revived unhappy memories of the truth-dodging nadirs of the Clinton White House.

Whatever his caveats, Mr. Clinton did not explicitly oppose the Iraq war from the beginning. But Al Gore did unequivocally and loudly in a public speech before the beginning, as did an obscure Illinois state senator named Barack Obama. What if Mrs. Clinton had led an insurrection against the war authorization in the Senate? Might she have helped impede America’s rush into one of the greatest fiascos in our history?

That history cannot be rewritten in any case, by Bill Clinton or anyone else. But future history is yet to be made. In the year to come, it will be written by the candidates and the voters, not by those journalists who, as the old saw has it, lay down history’s first draft.

Election year isn’t even here yet, and already most of the first drafts penned by the political press have proved instantly disposable, from Fred Thompson’s irresistible Reaganesque star power to the Family Research Council’s ability to abort the rise of Rudy Giuliani. The biggest Beltway myth so far — that the Clinton campaign is “textbook perfect” and “tightly disciplined” — was surely buried for good by the undisciplined former president’s seemingly panic-driven blunder last week.

The Washington wisdom about Mr. Obama has often been just as wrong as that about Mrs. Clinton. We kept being told he was making rookie mistakes and offering voters wispy idealistic sentiments rather than the real beef of policy. But what the Beltway mistook for gaffes often was the policy.

Mr. Obama’s much-derided readiness to talk promptly and directly to the leaders of Iran and Syria, for instance, was a clear alternative, agree with it or not, to Mrs. Clinton’s same-old Foggy Bottom platitudes on the subject. His supposedly reckless pledge to chase down Osama bin Laden and his gang in Pakistan, without Pakistani permission if necessary, was a pointed rebuke of both Mrs. Clinton’s and President Bush’s misplaced fealty to our terrorist-enabling “ally,” Pervez Musharraf. Like Mr. Obama’s prescient Iraq speech of 2002, his open acknowledgment of the Pakistan president’s slipperiness turned out to be ahead of the curve.

Now that the Beltway establishment, jolted by the Iowa polls, is frantically revising its premature blueprints for a Clinton coronation and declaring, as Time’s inevitable cliché would have it, that Mr. Obama has “found his voice,” it’s worth looking at some campaign story lines that have been ignored so far. They tell us more than the hyped scenarios that have fallen apart. Indeed, they flip the standard narrative of Campaign 2008 on its head: Were Mr. Obama to best Mrs. Clinton for the Democratic nomination, he may prove harder for the Republicans to rally against and defeat than the all-powerful, battle-tested Clinton machine.

The unspoken truth is that the Clinton machine is not being battle-tested at all by the Democratic primary process. When Mrs. Clinton accused John Edwards of “throwing mud” and “personally” attacking her in a sharp policy exchange in one debate, the press didn’t challenge the absurd hyperbole of her claim. In reality, neither Mr. Edwards nor any other Democratic competitor will ever hit her with the real, personal mud being stockpiled by the right. But if she’s getting a bye now, she will not from the Republican standard-bearer, whoever he may be. Clinton-bashing is the last shared article of faith (and last area of indisputable G.O.P. competence) that could yet unite the fractured and dispirited conservative electorate.

The Republicans know this and are so psychologically invested in refighting the Clinton wars that they’re giddy. Karl Rove’s first column for Newsweek last week, “How to Beat Hillary (Next) November,” proceeded from the premise that her nomination was a done deal. In the G.O.P. debates through last Thursday, the candidates mentioned the Clintons some 65 times. Barack Obama’s name has not been said once.

But much like the Clinton campaign itself, the Republicans have fallen into a trap by continuing to cling to the Hillary-is-inevitable trope. They have not allowed themselves to think the unthinkable — that they might need a Plan B to go up against a candidate who is not she. It’s far from clear that they would remotely know how to construct a Plan B to counter Mr. Obama. The repeated attempts to fan “rumors” that he is a madrassa-indoctrinated Muslim — whether on Fox News or in The Washington Post, where they resurfaced scurrilously on the front page on Thursday — are too demonstrably false to survive endless reruns even in the Swift-boating era.

Part of the Republicans’ difficulty in countering Mr. Obama, should they have to, is their own cynical racial politics. For the most part, race has been the dog that hasn’t barked in this campaign despite the (largely) white press’s endless fretting about whether the Illinois senator is too white for black voters and too black for white voters. Most Americans aren’t racist, most Republicans included. (Those who are won’t vote for the Democratic presidential candidate even if it’s not Mr. Obama.) But the G.O.P., by its own doing, is nonetheless saddled with a history that most recently includes “macaca” and Katrina, Mr. Bush’s appearance at Bob Jones University in 2000 and the nonexistent black population of its Congressional delegation.

As the Republican leadership knows, this record is an albatross, driving away not just black voters but crucial white swing voters, too. Ken Mehlman, the former G.O.P. chairman, and Mr. Rove, as recently as in that Newsweek column, have implored their party to reach out to minorities. So have Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp. But not even conservative leaders of this stature could persuade their party’s top 2008 presidential contenders to show up for a September debate moderated by Tavis Smiley for PBS at the historically black Morgan State University.

It’s not because those no-shows are racists; it’s because they are defensive and out of touch. With the notable exception of Mike Huckabee, most of the party’s candidates have barricaded themselves from African-Americans for so long that they don’t know how to speak to or about them. As sure-footed as these Republicans are in attacking the Clintons and Streisand — or in exchanging fire with Al Sharpton and hip-hop moguls — they are strangers to the mainstream multiracial and multicultural America exemplified by an Obama or an Oprah.

An Obama candidacy would force them to engage. Or try to. A matchup between Mr. Obama and Mr. Giuliani, who was forged in the racial crucible of New York’s police brutality nightmares of the 1990s, or between Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney, who was shaped by a religion that didn’t give blacks equal membership until 1978, would be less a clash of races than of centuries.

But there’s another, even more fascinating hidden story line in the 2008 campaign that speaks to the potential prowess of an Obama candidacy. Despite the thuggish name-calling of a few right-wing die-hards (e.g., Rush Limbaugh mocking “Barack Hussein Odumbo”), the dirty secret of a number of conservatives is that they are disarmed by Mr. Obama even though they know his record is more liberal than Mrs. Clinton’s.

The drumbeat of approval has been remarkably steady. Last year Mark McKinnon, a top adviser to both the 2000 and 2004 Bush campaigns, admiringly called Mr. Obama “a walking, talking hope machine” who “may reshape American politics.” Andrew Ferguson devoted pages in The Weekly Standard to raving about “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama’s memoir, before dismissing its political sequel, “The Audacity of Hope.” Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, keeps trying to write anti-Obama articles but they’re so mild that they never really contradict his judgment of a year ago that the senator from Illinois “is the only presidential candidate from either party about whom there is a palpable excitement.” Even Tom Tancredo, the most virulent immigration demagogue of the G.O.P. presidential field, has spoken warmly of Mr. Obama.

Perhaps most striking is the case of Shelby Steele, the archconservative scholar who shares Mr. Obama’s mixed-race heritage. Though he has just written an entire book, “A Bound Man,” to argue (unpersuasively, in my view) that Mr. Obama “can’t win,” he can’t stop himself from admiring the guy throughout. Peggy Noonan wasn’t being tongue-in-cheek when she wondered in The Wall Street Journal last month whether Mr. Obama “understands the kind of quiet cheering he is beginning to garner from some Republicans.” In her view “they see him as a Democrat who could cure the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton sickness.”

Or at least they do in the abstract. Should Mr. Obama upend the Beltway story line by taking Iowa, the Republicans will have every reason to be as fearful as the Clinton camp is now.

The Paper Chase...

They say unto him, "Caesar's." Then saith he unto them, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's. "
- Matthew 22:21

This is essentially just a note to say that I have not written and will not write any blogs for the duration of my first semester at law school. Perhaps I'll write again over winter break, but until then, please understand that I am swamped in work and generally oblivious to the world around me.
Until December, you can enjoy the above verse that illustrates Jesus's rudimentary understanding of contract law... who needs the UCC?

The idea that is America

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his brothers.
- John 15:13

I was reading through some works by Emerson on the night of July 4th (having just returned from the fireworks over Lake Superior), when I came upon the following hymn. It struck just the right chord with me that evening. The poem was read in Music Hall, January 1, 1863 - the day the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.

Boston Hymn
The word of the Lord by night
To the watching Pilgrims came,
As they sat beside the seaside,
And filled their hearts with flame.

God said, I am tired of kings,
I suffer them no more;
Up to my ear the morning brings
The outrage of the poor.

Think ye I made this ball
A field of havoc and war,
Where tyrants great and tyrants small
Might harry the weak and poor?

My angel,--his name is Freedom,
Choose him to be your king;
He shall cut pathways east and west
And fend you with his wing.

Lo! I uncover the land
Which I hid of old time in the West,
As the sculptor uncovers the statue
When he has wrought his best;

I show Columbia, of the rocks
Which dip their foot in the seas
And soar to the air-borne flocks
Of clouds and the boreal fleece.

I will divide my goods;
Call in the wretch and slave
None shall rule but the humble,
And none but Toil shall have.

I will have never a noble,
No lineage counted great;
Fishers and choppers and ploughmen
Shall constitute a state.

Go, cut down trees in the forest
And trim the straightest boughs;
Cut down trees in the forest
And build me a wooden house.

Call the people together,
The young men and the sires,
The digger in the harvest-field,
Hireling and him that hires;

And here in a pine state-house
They shall choose men to rule
In every needful faculty,
In church and state and school.

Lo, now! if these poor men
Can govern the land and the sea
And make just laws below the sun,
As planets faithful be.

And ye shall succor men;
'Tis nobleness to serve;
Help them who cannot help again
Beware from right to swerve.

I break your bonds and masterships,
And I unchain the slave
Free be his heart and hand henceforth
As wind and wandering wave.

I cause from every creature
His proper good to flow
As much as he is and doeth,
So much he shall bestow.

But, laying hands on another
To coin his labor and sweat,
He goes in pawn to his victim
For eternal years in debt.

To-day unbind the captive,
So only are ye unbound;
Lift up a people from the dust,
Trump of their rescue, sound!

Pay ransom to the owner
And fill the bag to the brim.
Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
And ever was. Pay him.

O North! give him beauty for rags,
And honor, O South! for his shame;
Nevada! coin thy golden crags
With Freedom's image and name.

Up! and the dusky race
That sat in darkness long,--
Be swift their feet as antelopes,
And as behemoth strong.

Come, East and West and North,
By races, as snow-flakes,
And carry my purpose forth,
Which neither halts nor shakes.

My will fulfilled shall be,
For, in daylight or in dark,
My thunderbolt has eyes to see
His way home to the mark.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are a country founded deeply in the search for freedom and the belief (however imperfectly understood) that all men are created equal; we are a great nation built of those at the end of their rope - the poor, the tired, the huddled masses longing to be free; we are a people who for the last century have often stood as a beacon of the truly free in the face of fascism and communism alike; we are a brotherhood that spilled out our blood upon our land for the freedom of an enslaved population - an event repeated nowhere else in the history of the world. This poem brought to mind all those things and more.

Nothing but Fear itself

Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage;
be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed:
for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.
- Joshua 1:9

From Tocqueville to Zakaria, it is perhaps appropriate some of the most insightful authors to evaluate our nation have been foreigners. I’d like to take some space in my blog this Independence Day to highlight a main point from Fareed Zakaria’s excellent article in the June 11^th Newsweek entitled, “Beyond Bush.”

In the fall of 1982, I arrived in the United States as an 18-year-old student from India. The country was in rough shape. That December unemployment hit 10.8 percent, higher than at any point since World War II. Interest rates hovered around 15 percent. Abroad, the United States was still reeling from Vietnam and Watergate. The Soviet Union was on a roll, expanding its influence from Afghanistan to Angola to Central America. That June, Israel invaded Lebanon, making a tense situation in the Middle East even more volatile.

Yet America was a strikingly open and expansive country. Reagan embodied it. Despite record-low approval ratings, he exuded optimism from the center of the storm. In the face of Moscow's rising power he confidently spoke of a mortal crisis in the Soviet system and predicted that it would end up on "the ash heap of history." Across the political aisle stood Thomas (Tip) O'Neill, the hearty Irish-American Speaker of the House, who personified the enormous generosity and tolerance of old-school liberalism. To a young foreign student the country seemed welcoming and full of promise.

Today, by almost all objective measures, the United States sits on top of the world. But the atmosphere in Washington could not be more different from 1982. We have become a nation consumed by fear, worried about terrorists and rogue nations, Muslims and Mexicans, foreign companies and free trade, immigrants and international organizations. The strongest nation in the history of the world, we see ourselves besieged and overwhelmed. While the Bush administration has contributed mightily to this state of affairs, at this point it has reversed itself on many of its most egregious policies—from global warming to North Korea to Iraq.

In any event, it is time to stop bashing George W. Bush. We must begin to think about life after Bush—a cheering prospect for his foes, a dismaying one for his fans (however few there may be at the moment). In 19 months he will be a private citizen, giving speeches to insurance executives. America, however, will have to move on and restore its place in the world. To do this we must first tackle the consequences of our foreign policy of fear. Having spooked ourselves into believing that we have no option but to act fast, alone, unilaterally and pre-emptively, we have managed in six years to destroy decades of international good will, alienate allies, embolden enemies and yet solve few of the major international problems we face.

In a global survey released last week, most countries polled believed that China would act more responsibly in the world than the United States. How does a Leninist dictatorship come across more sympathetically than the oldest constitutional democracy in the world? Some of this is, of course, the burden of being the biggest. But the United States has been the richest and most powerful nation in the world for almost a century, and for much of this period it was respected, admired and occasionally even loved. The problem today is not that America is too strong but that it is seen as too arrogant, uncaring and insensitive. Countries around the world believe that the United States, obsessed with its own notions of terrorism, has stopped listening to the rest of the world.

More troubling than any of Bush's rhetoric is that of the Republicans who wish to succeed him. "They hate you!" says Rudy Giuliani in his new role as fearmonger in chief, relentlessly reminding audiences of all the nasty people out there. "They don't want you to be in this college!" he recently warned an audience at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. "Or you, or you, or you," he said, reportedly jabbing his finger at students. In the first Republican debate he warned, "We are facing an enemy that is planning all over this world, and it turns out planning inside our country, to come here and kill us." On the campaign trail, Giuliani plays a man exasperated by the inability of Americans to see the danger staring them in the face. "This is reality, ma'am," he told a startled woman at Oglethorpe. "You've got to clear your head."

The notion that the United States today is in grave danger of sitting back and going on the defensive is bizarre. In the last five and a half years, with bipartisan support, Washington has invaded two countries and sent troops around the world from Somalia to the Philippines to fight Islamic militants. It has ramped up defense spending by $187 billion—more than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, India and Britain. It has created a Department of Homeland Security that now spends more than $40 billion a year. It has set up secret prisons in Europe and a legal black hole in Guantánamo, to hold, interrogate and—by some definitions—torture prisoners. How would Giuliani really go on the offensive? Invade a couple of more countries?

The presidential campaign could have provided the opportunity for a national discussion of the new world we live in. So far, on the Republican side, it has turned into an exercise in chest-thumping. Whipping up hysteria requires magnifying the foe. The enemy is vast, global and relentless. Giuliani casually lumps together Iran and Al Qaeda. Mitt Romney goes further, banding together all the supposed bad guys. "This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hizbullah and Hamas and Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood," he recently declared.

But Iran is a Shiite power and actually helped the United States topple the Qaeda-backed Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Qaeda-affiliated radical Sunnis are currently slaughtering Shiites in Iraq, and Iranian-backed Shiite militias are responding by executing and displacing Iraq's Sunnis. We are repeating one of the central errors of the early cold war—putting together all our potential adversaries rather than dividing them. Mao and Stalin were both nasty. But they were nasties who disliked one another, a fact that could be exploited to the great benefit of the free world. To miss this is not strength. It's stupidity.

The competition to be the tough guy is producing new policy ideas, all right—ones that range from bad to insane. Romney, who bills himself as the smart, worldly manager, recently explained that while "some people have said we ought to close Guantánamo, my view is we ought to double [the size of] Guantánamo." In fact, Romney should recognize that Guantánamo does not face space constraints. The reason that President Bush wants to close it down—and it is he who has expressed that desire—is that it is an unworkable legal mess with enormous strategic, political and moral costs. In a real war you hold prisoners of war until the end of hostilities. When does that happen in the war on terror? Does Romney propose that the United States keep an ever-growing population of suspects in jail indefinitely without trials as part of a new American system of justice?

In 2005 Romney said, "How about people who are in settings—mosques, for instance—that may be teaching doctrines of hate and terror? Are we monitoring that? Are we wiretapping?" This proposal is mild compared with what Rep. Tom Tancredo suggested the same year. When asked about a possible nuclear strike by Islamic radicals on the United States, he suggested that the U.S. military threaten to "take out" Mecca.

**

Above all, the United States has to find a way to send a powerful and consistent signal to the world that we understand the struggles that it is involved in—for security, peace and a better standard of living. As Barack Obama said in a speech in Chicago, "It's time to ... send a message to all those men and women beyond our shores who long for lives of dignity and security that says, 'You matter to us. Your future is our future'."

Some of foreign policy is what we do, but some of it is also who we are. America as a place has often been the great antidote to U.S. foreign policy. When American actions across the world have seemed harsh, misguided or unfair, America itself has always been open, welcoming and tolerant. I remember visiting the United States as a kid in the 1970s, at a time when, as a country, India was officially anti-American. The reality of the America that I experienced was a powerful refutation of the propaganda and caricatures of its enemies. But today, through inattention, fear and bureaucratic cowardice, the caricature threatens to become reality.

At the end of the day, openness is America's greatest strength. Many people on both sides of the political aisle have ideas that they believe will keep America strong in this new world—fences, tariffs, subsidies, investments. But America has succeeded not because of the ingenuity of its government programs. It has thrived because it has kept itself open to the world—to goods and services, ideas and inventions, people and cultures. This openness has allowed us to respond fast and flexibly in new economic times, to manage change and diversity with remarkable ease, and to push forward the boundaries of freedom and autonomy.

It is easy to look at America's place in the world right now and believe that we are in a downward spiral of decline. But this is a snapshot of a tough moment. If the country can keep its cool, admit to its mistakes, cherish and strengthen its successes, it will not only recover but return with renewed strength. There could not have been a worse time for America than the end of the Vietnam War, with helicopters lifting people off the roof of the Saigon embassy, the fallout of Watergate and, in the Soviet Union, a global adversary that took advantage of its weakness. And yet, just 15 years later, the United States was resurgent, the U.S.S.R. was in its death throes and the world was moving in a direction that was distinctly American in flavor. The United States has new challenges, new adversaries and new problems. But unlike so much of the world, it also has solutions—if only it has the courage and wisdom to implement them.

I’m not sure who my drill sergeant (a veteran of Operation Just Cause) was quoting when he told my Basic Training platoon that courage isn’t the absence of fear, it is the ability not to let fear influence your decisions. Of course, he was right. If fear commands in combat, it means death on the battlefield. If fear commands in a person’s life, that means a different sort of death. If fear commands a national policy, how can we expect a different result?

Republican presidential candidates can’t get enough of declaring that they are Reagan era conservatives (so as to distance themselves from the Bush era). Well, candidates Guiliani, Tancredo, and Romney, if you want to be like Reagan in any sort of positive way, then stop pandering politics of fear. I dearly hope your chest-thumping brand of cowardice that you market as courageous leadership is seen for what it is before the voting public makes another horrific mistake.

Let us look instead to a leader who can rightly declare along with FDR, “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19001200/site/newsweek/

Accountability... anybody? A little accountability... please...

But if you reject my decrees and abhor my laws, then I will do this to you:
I will set my face against you so that you will be defeated by your enemies; those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee even when no one is pursuing you. If after all this you will not listen to me, I will punish you for your sins seven times over.
-Leviticus 26:14,16-17

The conviction of I. Lewis Libby was just about the only hint of accountability this thoroughly criminal, irresponsible, reckless, incompetent, dishonest administration has been touched by. I don't need to repeat here the very serious effects of outing a top level CIA officer for political reasons (see March 12th blog). I don't need to repeat here how much contempt this administration has shown for every man on the ground around the world, from troops in Iraq to CIA operatives and their agents in the field.
Right on the heals of Dick Cheney inventing a fourth branch of government to avoid even the minimal disclosure of his office's operations for oversight, Bush comes through with another staggering move of arrogance: he commutes Libby's sentence. In what amounts to some sort of sick joke the president said Libby didn't get off easy: he still has to pay a $250,000 fine and gets to go on probation for a few months. Mind you, several million dollars was raised in his defense by former Ambassador Richard Carlson.
The guy deserves a lifetime in jail along with anyone else (Richard Armitage and Dick Cheney) involved in leaking an undercover CIA officer's identity for political motivations. But Bush manages to make the United States weaker yet one more time. He once more arrogantly flaunts the law and the heroic sacrifice of those who serve our country. His disrespect for the idea that is America sickens me.

I think I'll conclude my tirade with some revealing responses from political leaders on both sides of the aisle:

"The president said he would hold accountable anyone involved in the Valerie Plame leak case. By his action today, the president shows his word is not to be believed."
— House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

"While for a long time I have urged a pardon for Scooter, I respect the president's decision. This will allow a good American, who has done a lot for his country, to resume his life."
— Former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn.

"Only a president clinically incapable of understanding that mistakes have consequences could take the action he did today. President Bush has just sent exactly the wrong signal to the country and the world."
— former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C.

"President Bush did the right thing today in commuting the prison term for Scooter Libby. The prison sentence was overly harsh and the punishment did not fit the crime."
— House Republican Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri.

"The arrogance of this administration's disdain for the law and its belief it operates with impunity are breathtaking. Will the president also commute the sentences of others who obstructed justice and lied to grand juries, or only those who act to protect President Bush and Vice President Cheney?"
— New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

An argument for withdrawal (Part Two)

"He putteth forth his hand upon the rock; he overturneth the mountains by the roots. He cutteth out rivers among the rocks; and his eye seeth every precious thing. He bindeth the floods from overflowing; and the thing that is hid bringeth he forth to light.
But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?
Man knoweth not the price thereof; neither is it found in the land of the living."
- Job 28:9-13

Common arguments for perpetuating the war:

“Better the chaos and slaughter over there than here.”

I have yet to see a single credible intelligence or foreign policy analyst suggest that anything remotely like Iraq could happen here in the U.S. whether U.S. forces are still in Iraq or not. Every serious analyst I’ve looked at from DIA to DHS says that it is very likely that one day in the not too distant future terrorists will manage to pull off a devastating attack once more on American soil whether U.S. forces are in Iraq or not. And, by the way, no level of border security or invasive, warrantless surveillance by federal authorities will be able to make us “safe” either. The bottom line is that there is no possible way the chaos of Iraq can reach the U.S.. Why? Because of fundamental differences between the two nations.

The average Iraqi citizen is increasingly hostile to the American “occupation” and loyal to partisan militias, Americans by and large are not especially sympathetic to terrorists who are trying to kill them. Iraq is plagued by centuries of blood feuds between clans, ethnicities, and religions, America has the Red Sox and the Yankees. Iraq is surrounded by states far more likely to fuel the fires of conflict than Mexico or Canada (though one never knows about that Harper fella, he did refuse to meet with Bono at the G8 summit, and if that doesn’t qualify as "Axis of Evil" material, I don’t know what does). And if one takes a look at where the terrorists are from that have actually tried to conduct attacks on American soil, one would see that they are not from Iraq, they are from Great Britain, Canada, and American citizens. This argument is simply a wholehearted embrace of the politics of Fear.

“If we leave, Iraq will descend into chaos, and we can’t let that happen because…”

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Iraq is getting worse and worse and there seems to be nothing we can do about it. As it turns out (as almost every general who was asked predicted) the troop surge is a spectacular failure. Even the overly optimistic generals on the ground have admitted that the army has been able to secure only a third of the Baghdad neighborhoods they hoped to by this point in the surge. They cite Iraqi army incompetence and cowardice as a reason that U.S. troops have not been able to move on from these few Baghdad neighborhoods. Also it is increasingly noted that Iraq’s police force is essentially just a training ground for the thousands of armed partisans that fill the ranks of local militias (and is it any surprise when we consider that those policemen’s families have to live in these neighborhoods administered by armed militias). Ultimately, whether we are there or not, the situation is going to get far worse before it gets better.

As a side note, although absolute chaos in Iraq is a possibility if we leave, I think the chances of that happening are actually quite low. Probably the most significant reason for this is that the regional powers really don’t have a vested interest in a large, completely failed state in their neighborhood.

“If we leave Iraq, that will send a signal to our enemies that we are weak, and it will embolden them.”

I guess I’ll have to break the bad news once more: that horse left the barn a long, long time ago. I figure the “enemies” must be rogue nation states (i.e. Iran, N. Korea, Syria, etc.) and terrorist groups (Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.). I think both groups are quite aware of the situation in Iraq, and I don’t think they could be any more emboldened than they are now.

The whole world knows that we have failed in Iraq: we have lost. Only the Bush PR machine and about 30% of the American population are desperately clinging to this absurd fantasy of the U.S. smoothly sailing on to victory in Iraq, having only to weather an occasional squall. The reality is that the whole world watched the American people punish Bush for the war in the congressional election of 2006. The whole world can see Bush’s job approval rating is worse than Nixon’s in the process of being impeached. The whole world saw an unprecedented number of generals and admirals (both active and retired) and the Army Times editor calling for the resignation of Rumsfeld. The whole world can see that the U.S. forces, despite a valiant effort to hold the country together, are being killed at an alarming rate, are losing more and more ground to partisan forces, and are having little to no success training up an effective Iraqi army and police force. The whole world can see how our military is broke: two year deployments with a one year turn around, the chief of staff saying that 1/3 of the army’s equipment has been consumed in Iraq and Afghanistan, recruiting grandparents (I kid you not, in my old Guard unit a grandmother and her grandson joined at the same time), felons, and those who declare they one day hope to get a GED: recruiters are scraping the bottom of the barrel. The whole world can see that the Interior Minister of Afghanistan just this week declared that coalition forces rule by day, but “the Taliban rules the night” in his country, and we are powerless to stop it because we are so deeply mired in Iraq. The whole world can see that Bush is about as popular home and abroad as the Bubonic Plague.

As for specifically terrorist groups, Osama bin Laden has rallied his troops for decades by saying “Remember Mogadishu! The West will run if we spill enough of their blood.” I hate to be the furtherer bearer of bad news, but that is enough for zealots to be as emboldened as they can be. That was 1993 and it still emboldens the terrorists, of course, they also are regularly emboldened by remembering the Crusdaes, and how the West was ultimately pushed out of the Arab world by enough blood spilled. When I was in Bosnia, I was an analyst specializing in extremist groups and I watched their propaganda and recruitment videos. Let me assure you that our pulling out of Iraq will be one more thing for them to get excited about, but it will have no discernable effect amongst the warped minds of fundamentalist, religious zealots.

I conclude my argument by summarizing that there are no good reasons to stay in Iraq, there are only scores of very good reasons to leave Iraq.

An argument for withdrawal (Part One)

And the victory that day was turned into mourning unto all the people.
- 2 Samuel 19:2

Recently, I was asked for my thoughts on whether we (the American military presence) should pull out of Iraq or not. Naturally, this became the subject for a blog. The argument that constitutes the following entry goes against my soldierly instinct of “no retreat” and so it was not easily that I settled upon this conclusion: we should pull out of Iraq, and we should do it soon.

The foundation of any effective argument is to understand and frame the problem correctly. In terms of understanding the problem, I do my best to stay up on current events through a variety of sources (from the WSJ to the NYT), and I’d like to think that my background as an army intelligence analyst contributes to a more informed position. In terms of framing the question, I think it is important to understand that there have been 3,521 American military members killed in Iraq since the war began (03/19/03); 25,830 American military seriously wounded (that is the official total, though depending ion the definition of “seriously wounded” NGO’s have placed the figure as high as 75,000); 65,000 – 70,000 Iraqi citizens reported killed in military actions since the war began (those numbers are reported deaths by military action, mind you); and a UN estimate of four million displaced Iraqis flooding into neighboring countries that are entirely unprepared to deal with the massive influx of people. With these kinds of numbers, the onus is not on the one wishing to end such actions as lead to these results; rather, it is the unpleasant obligation of those wishing to perpetuate the situation leading to these atrocities that must offer up many exceptionally good reasons to continue this tragically misguided and obviously failing war.

Let us first evaluate what the war effort in Iraq is accomplishing so as to clearly demonstrate my supposition that the effects of the war have been almost entirely disastrous. After this is established, we’ll consider the most common arguments used to argue that continuing the war is a good idea.

I’ve chosen four substantial effects of the war in Iraq with which to build my supposition.

1) The war in Iraq has made Iran more powerful than the Persians have been since the days of Xerxes. We eliminated the only legitimate opposition to Iran’s position as a regional super-power, while making ourselves too weak to check the growing Iranian nuclear threat. The Shiite government has found a ready ally in Iran, though not as strong an alliance as have the Shiite radical imams, death squads, and numerous partisan militias.

2) Al-Qaeda was on life support after September 11^th, but the war in Iraq has flooded their ranks and made them the most powerful terrorist network on the planet. Daniel Byman (Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University) reminds us in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs that there was a time when the whole world (ally or not) was hunting down Al-Qaeda wherever they were to be found. The terrorist network was almost entirely eliminated, but due almost exclusively to the war in Iraq, Al-Qaeda is now larger and more lethal than ever. The network exports increasingly savage tactics, holy warriors, money, and information into Kashmir, Chechnya, Somalia, and ironically back into Afghanistan where Al-Qaeda was formerly centered.

3) The war in Iraq has made Radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr the most powerful man in Iraq. The gangland style execution of former dictator Saddam Hussein with the executioners chanting “Moqtada! Moqtada! Moqtada!” says it all. He commands as many “allies” in the Iraqi parliament as any single party (bringing the government to a standstill last year when he demanded a boycott of the parliament). His armed followers have thoroughly infiltrated all official Iraqi security forces, control the streets of east Baghdad and the Shiite south, and fill the ranks of numerous death squads who assassinate Iraqi politicians with impunity and terrorize the Sunni minority. Moqtada al-Sadr was a junior cleric of no importance that the war in Iraq has made into a (if not the) actual national leader.

4) Prior to Iraq, Arab dictators were under a great deal of pressure to reform, but they now rest easy. I paraphrase from an excellent article by Marina Ottaway (Director of the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace): The failure of U.S. policy in Iraq has provided autocratic regimes in the Middle East a reprieve from the pressure to democratize, as long as they position themselves clearly on the side of Washington in its looming confrontation with Iran, Syria, and Shiite Islamists. Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been the biggest beneficiaries of the U.S. loss of interest in draining the swamp of autocracy once it was confronted by large alligators of its own making such as Iran and its allies. Once again, autocracy is thriving – and so are the alligators.

These four effects of the war effort in Iraq are not all one could offer as support of my supposition. One could talk about the dramatically enhanced standing of China on the world stage as U.S. credibility the world over conversely plummets. One could talk about the obvious lack of military threat from the U.S. to check North Korean nuclear ambitions, the genocide in Darfur, or a hypothetical attack on our own homeland. One could talk about the army being stretched to a breaking point on many levels. One could talk about the still ballooning financial cost of the war $440,397,667,000 as of 06/17/07. One could talk about the ever increasing rate of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq as the partisan forces improve their tactics. – But I imagine the four cited effects of the war in Iraq should be enough to establish that the effects of the war are overwhelmingly negative.

[I will conclude this argument by discussing the more common arguments for continuing the war in the next blog entry.]