Month: September 2004

The question lingers: why would anyone in the administration want to leak to Robert Novak that Bush is contemplating a quickish exit from Iraq? An obvious thought is that the leak comes from someone diametrically opposed to such a stance. An admission of any plan of that kind would demoralize the president’s supporters (and war supporters) and probably prompt a question in the debates or upcoming news conferences. The president might then be forced to dismiss such an idea, boxing himself into the neoconservative position before the election. Tada! You scotch the withdrawal idea by raising it. The beauty of this is that it uses that anti-war curmudgeon, Novak, to bolster the president’s resolve. Alternatively, it’s less an attempt to corner the president than to wake him up. “Look,” someone might be trying to say from within the cocoon. “You might still think we’re marching to victory but almost no one else does. We’re in a situation where withdrawal is increasingly a least-worst option.” That comports with the allegedly despondent mood of Paul Wolfowitz, addressing a bunch of Iraqi exiles last week. Wolfowitz is a smart and principled man. He knows the extent of the failure since the fall of Baghdad and may be doing his best to rescue something from it. So you have Wolfowitz, Hagel, McCain, and Graham all trying to wake the president up – or bounce him into a concrete commitment of more money, troops and attention before the election. All this is purely my conjecture. Whatever scenario is more accurate, the underlying message is clear. Most of Washington now believes that the war in Iraq is all but lost and that Bush has to tell us soon how he intends to turn things around. People are coming out of denial. And that’s dangerous for the president if it becomes widespread before November 2.

THOUGHTS ON KERRY: It also behooves John Kerry to say what he would do about, say, Fallujah. His speech yesterday was not, to my ears, an anti-war speech, although David Brooks is spinning it that way this morning. It was an attempt to mount an attack on the president on the basis of his incompetent war-management. But because of that, Kerry must also offer concrete differences between him and the president on the issue of how practically to defeat the insurgency. We heard none. No, it’s not his primary responsibility right now. But if he wants to be president, it will be his responsibility next year. Again, you have both sides evading responsibility. One side won’t say whether he intends to ratchet up the war soon; the other side won’t say if he will either and offers a vain hope that the problem can be internationalized. It’s a game of vague chicken. We deserve better.

I wonder if either candidate has pondered the benefits of actually losing this election? If Kerry wins, you can see how the Republicans would then blame all the inevitable mess in Iraq on his vacillation (even if he doesn’t budge an inch), and marshall a Tet offensive argument that implies that if only Washington hadn’t given up, the Blessed Leader would have seen the war to victory. Kerry wouldn’t be able to win, whatever he does. And because he’d be more fiscally responsible than Bush (could anyone be less fiscally responsible?) he wouldn’t have much in the way of domestic goodies to keep his base happy. But if Bush wins and heads into a real, live second Vietnam in Iraq, his party will split, the country will become even more bitterly polarized than now (especially if he’s re-elected because he’s not Kerry) and he’ll become another end-of-career Lyndon Johnson. The presidency of the U.S. is never an easy job. But it could be a brutal one these next four years. Which sane person would want the job?

THE ADMINISTRATION’S OPEN MIND: Here’s a fascinating little vignette about the way in which this administration is prosecuting the war. It’s a fawning account of a recent Rumsfeld speech. Money quote:

The crux of the speech came during the question-and-answer session, when an audience member posed the following: “The Financial Times today editorializes that it is ‘time to consider Iraq withdrawal,’ noting the protracted war is not winnable and it’s creating more terrorists than enemies of the West. What is your response?” An irritated yet good-natured Rumsfeld responded, “Who put that question in? He ought to get a life. If he’s got time to read that kind of stuff, he ought to get a life.”

Yep. Anyone who even reads bad news has the wrong attitude and should “get a life.” And people wonder why this White House did not listen to internal advice about post-war planning before the war or seems divorced from reality in so many ways. Rather Ratheresque.

For the sake of open-mindedness on this blog, let me reprint an email from Hugh Hewitt’s blog from a marine in Iraq. I can’t “authenticate” it, and I hope Hewitt vetted it. (Hewitt is, alas, a pure partisan – his own site’s motto is about the destruction of Democrats, whoever they are – but the email rings true to me.) Here it is:

The naysayers will point to the recent battles in Najaf and draw parallels between that and what happened in Fallujah in April. They aren’t even close. The bad guys did us a HUGE favor by gathering together in one place and trying to make a stand. It allowed us to focus on them and defeat them. Make no mistake, Al Sadr’s troops were thoroughly smashed. The estimated enemy killed in action is huge. Before the battles, the residents of the city were afraid to walk the streets. Al Sadr’s enforcers would seize people and bring them to his Islamic court where sentence was passed for religious or other violations. Long before the battles people were looking for their lost loved ones who had been taken to “court” and never seen again. Now Najafians can and do walk their streets in safety. Commerce has returned and the city is being rebuilt. Iraqi security forces and US troops are welcomed and smiled upon. That city was liberated again. It was not like Fallujah – the bad guys lost and are in hiding or dead.
You may not have even heard about the city of Samarra. Two weeks ago, that Sunni Triangle city was a “No-go” area for US troops. But guess what? The locals got sick of living in fear from the insurgents and foreign fighters that were there and let them know they weren’t welcome. They stopped hosting them in their houses and the mayor of the town brokered a deal with the US commander to return Iraqi government sovereignty to the city without a fight. The people saw what was on the horizon and decided they didn’t want their city looking like Fallujah in April or Najaf in August.
Boom, boom, just like that two major “hot spots” cool down in rapid succession. Does that mean that those towns are completely pacified? No. What it does mean is that we are learning how to do this the right way. The US commander in Samarra saw an opportunity and took it – probably the biggest victory of his military career and nary a shot was fired in anger. Things will still happen in those cities, and you can be sure that the bad guys really want to take them back. Those achievements, more than anything else in my opinion, account for the surge in violence in recent days – especially the violence directed at Iraqis by the insurgents. Both in Najaf and Samarra ordinary people stepped out and took sides with the Iraqi government against the insurgents, and the bad guys are hopping mad. They are trying to instill fear once again. The worst thing we could do now is pull back and let that scum back into people’s homes and lives.

The last sentence reflects my feelings entirely. And I’m glad to see that morale has not been crushed by recent events. But it’s worth noting that Sadr is still free, that his power has increased and that many of his followers are still at large, armed and ready. The agreement in Samara is tenuous at best. Baghdad is slipping out of control. We have to thread an increasingly tiny needle in the next few months, while retaking Fallujah with an inevitably huge loss of innocent human life. It’s a brutal scenario – but one we have no choice but to confront.

KERRY FIGHTING BACK: Jake Tapper notices that the new “gloves-off” Kerry has been emerging at regular intervals since the beginning of the year.

Here’s John Kerry’s newest attempt to get a handle on the Iraq debate. It’s a big improvement. Money quote:

The administration told us we’d be greeted as liberators.- They were wrong.
They told us not to worry about looting or the sorry state of Iraq’s infrastructure.- They were wrong.
They told us we had enough troops to provide security and stability, defeat the insurgents, guard the borders and secure the arms depots.- They were wrong.
They told us we could rely on exiles like Ahmed Chalabi to build political legitimacy.- They were wrong.
They told us we would quickly restore an Iraqi civil service to run the country and a police force and army to secure it.- They were wrong.
In Iraq, this administration has consistently over-promised and under-performed.- This policy has been plagued by a lack of planning, an absence of candor, arrogance and outright incompetence.- And the President has held no one accountable, including himself.
In fact, the only officials who lost their jobs over Iraq were the ones who told the truth.

Ouch. I agree with everything but the first statement. We were greeted as liberators. Then we blew it.

I’ll be on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show tonight on Rathergate between 7 and 8pm EST.

“I saw your discomfort with Novak’s report in the blog, and I just wanted to say that it seems to me that we have two choices. One, admit that, given the other demands placed on U.S. forces, including maintaining a well-trained and well-equipped force at the ready, we simply do not have enough resources to create a democracy in Iraq, if that is even possible.
Second, admit that we are involved in a conflict that requires significantly more resources and raise them. If 100,000 members of the National Guard will have to be mobilized on a continuous basis over the next five years, why don’t we just acknowledge the obvious and expand the Army by 100,000 men and women?
The problem is that Bush likes calling himself a wartime president, but he does not like the responsibilities that flow therefrom, chiefly framing the sacrifices and choices that citizens face. It would be so refreshing to hear a politician say, “Look, we face the choice of paying for more high definition televisions and Ben and Jerry’s, or paying for more security. My job as president is to explain to you that it is worth paying more (and I mean paying, not borrowing from the Chinese central bank) for security.” Maybe I am way out of touch, but I think that a grown-up statement like that would resonate with people.
Instead we have a festival of pork barrel spending and a virtually empty political debate.” Amen. But Bush will never do such a thing because a) it would require conceding error and b) because it would require asking the American public to sacrifice, and he has never done that.

“I’m trying to find the correct name for it … this utter absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men. … I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I’m gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I’m gonna kill him and tell God he died.” – televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, on his television show last week … in Louisiana. Here’s the tape (he gets riled up around the 36th minute). He then goes on about those politicians who defend gay rights and dignity: “They all ought to marry a pig, and live with it forever… And I thank God that president Bush has stated that we need a constitutional amendment that says marriage is between a man and a woman.” (Swaggart also claims he has nothing against “the poor homosexual.” He’ll just kill one if he gets a chance.) Watch this broadcast and see the forces that this president is riding toward victory on.

Greg Djerejian thinks it’s mischief-making – but he doesn’t know, and he’s honest enough to be horrified at the possibility it’s true. Some NRO readers think it’s a trial balloon. I have no idea – but what it does show is that, at least within the administration, there is some recognition of how grim our options now are. It’s funny to see the relative silence at the Weekly Standard and NRO. Jonah is honest enough to raise the issue; but the others are probably waiting for the call from the RNC to be told what to write. Meanwhile, as for the past couple of weeks, radio silence from the right. (It is telling, though, that the only piece to tackle the hard reality of what has been going on was Derbyshire’s in favor of leaving the darkies behind.)

Wretchard of the Belmont Club misreads my analogy – two 9/11s a month – and then corrects himself. That’s the blogosphere working! But the spin he manages to put on all this is, well, off the deep end. He cites a worrying report that Britain is reducing its troop levels in Iraq as a sign that everything is peachy! Maybe he hasn’t read Novak yet. Or the papers. Then he rightly says that the deaths of Iraqis are not America’s fault, no more than 9/11 was Bush’s fault. Of course that’s true in any deep, moral sense. But when you invade a country, depose its dictator, disband its army and take responsibility for its security, you are responsible for its security. I know that’s a tough word for Bush administration officials to understand: responsibility. Yes, the authorities are responsible when citizens cannot live with any measurable degree of physical security. In fact, it’s the first responsibility of any governing body. Read your Hobbes. Also read Hobbes to see what happens once confidence in order collapses, when sovereignty is in doubt, when insufficient force is deployed, and on and on and on. We either have to ramp up our forces, retake Fallujah and Ramadi, redouble our faltering efforts to rebuild the Iraqi army – or we have to withdraw and leave chaos and a new terror-state behind. Them’s the options. Bush has to tell us which before November 2. And run on his plan. But he’d rather duck and hide.

This statement is pathetic in the extreme:

Last week, amid increasing questions about the authenticity of documents used in support of a 60 MINUTES WEDNESDAY story about President Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS News vowed to re-examine the documents in question-and their source-vigorously. And we promised that we would let the American public know what this examination turned up, whatever the outcome.
Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically. I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers. That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where-if I knew then what I know now-I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.
But we did use the documents. We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism.
Please know that nothing is more important to us than people’s trust in our ability and our commitment to report fairly and truthfully.

If the last sentence is true, then Rather and Heyward must resign. The original error was bad enough; the refusal to acknowledge it is inexplicable. And who is the source? There is no need for a reporter to keep confidential the identity of a source who provided false and fake information. That’s the next ten-ton shoe to drop on Dan’s head. It’s over, boyo. Leave now.