Month: January 2007

It is very hard to know what Ahmadinejad’s poor showing in recent elections means, but any splits within the Iranian elite are well worth exploiting. His populism may be wearing thin; and the sanctions – and unified global response – seems to have had an impact. This Linda Secor piece from Sunday was encouraging; so is this in today’s WSJ. I have no illusions about the "moderates" in Tehran’s regime. But we’ll have to deal with Iran at some point in the near future; and we’re better off with a divided leadership, rather than a united one.

Gregg Easterbrook stands up for the president’s SOTU vow to tighten federal mileage standards. Money quote:

Last week Bush proposed something environmentalists, energy analysts, greenhouse-effect researchers, and national-security experts have spent 20 years pleading for: a major strengthening of federal mileage standards for cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks. The number-one failing of U.S. energy policy is that vehicle mile-per-gallon standards have not been made stricter in two decades. Nothing the United States can do in energy policy is more important than an mpg increase. Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, and, until last week, George W. Bush had all refused to face the issue of America’s low-mpg vehicles, which are the root of U.S. dependency on Persian Gulf oil and a prime factor in rising U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. But now Bush favors a radical strengthening of federal mileage rules, and last week to boot became the first Republican president since Gerald Ford to embrace the basic concept of federal mileage regulation (called the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard).

Ouch:

To speak for 50 minutes or so and not to talk about the Iraq war before a conservative audience at a crucial moment in that war is bizarre and just wrong and almost offensive in my view.

Jack Shafer, with customary tact, posthumously examines a journalistic icon.

Above is just one of hundreds of color photographs of American life from 1939 to 1945, collected by the Library of Congress. It’s from Lincoln Nebraska in 1942. Here’s a helpful intro. Here’s another gem:

Browse the collection here. And say goodbye to your afternoon.

Bill Kristol says:

I’ve noticed the critics of the surge are already sort of saying well, OK, maybe it will work in the short term, but not in the long term. Two months ago they were denying that anything could help even in the short term.

Well, no. Plenty of us who are skeptical of Plus Up have long believed that a major increase in troop numbers could have made a difference in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. But we haven’t had such an increase, and we still don’t. 17,500 more troops is a joke, as Kristol was saying before his partisanship got a hold of him. I’m also befuddled by Kristol’s logic here:

The threat of the surge is working. One of the most bloodthirsty leaders of one of the Shia sectarian militias seems to have fled to Iran because he is worried. And people will say oh, well, he’ll come right back in. Well, fine. Let him try to come back in two or three years from now when the whole situation on the ground is different, when we’ve been able to tamp down the violence enough that the government’s been able to get a hold, et cetera.

But if the government’s been able to "get a hold" in two or three years’ time, why wouldn’t they invite the Shiite militias back in? They could help cleanse a few Sunni areas left uncleansed in the interim. Or does Kristol believe that a Shiite government will still be relying on tens of thousands of U.S. troops at that point to achieve a genuinely national solution? If so, one can only marvel at his reserves of optimism.

Here are two stimulating discussions of the many options the new Middle East offers to the U.S. The Sunni-Shia divide is a fault-line the West should obviously be exploiting to the hilt. Israel is already adjusting. Why can’t we?

Is that you’re in first class. The bad news …:

Even Ace of Spades is beginning to take off the blinders:

[I]t seemed to me – and I hope I’m not playing the role of clumsy Kremlinologist here – to suggest that the Bush administration has reduced its definition of "victory" in Iraq to an almost comically-low level. (It would be comical, but for the tragedy.) And that perhaps the Administration now believes that a helicopters-leaving-from-the-embassy-rooftop defeat is all but inevitable, and that their hopes are now pinned on the long view of history – sure, just like in Vietnam, we’ll have "lost," but in the fullness of time, we’ll actually win.

This meme has been around for a while. Recall that Cheney believes the last four years have been a procession of "enormous successes" in Iraq. He has his eye on the long-run. The rest of us keep looking at a time-line of a few years.

The Onion has the scoop.