Month: September 2008

Well, I Did Something Right

Thanks to Stephen Hayes:

There are legitimate questions about how Palin was vetted. But many news organizations are using the vetting issue as an excuse to make insinuations about Palin’s family and her role as a mother. Instead of asking whether McCain knew that Palin wanted "an exit plan" from Iraq in December of 2006, for example, reporters are obsessing about Bristol Palin’s fiancé and whether Sarah Palin can serve as vice president and be a good mother.

My italics. I’m not sure if this is the first time a neoconservative has raised the question of Palin’s views on Iraq. Even if it’s part of an argument that the press should stop checking on the obvious, glaring weirdnesses staring us all in the face here, it’s still a move toward sanity on the right. The people who should be most incensed by the Palin pick are foreign policy neoconservatives. The selection has made a mockery of their entire case for McCain. So why aren’t they publicly mad? I mean: they’re not partisans, right? They’re intellectuals.

McCain = McGovern?

One recalls something about history and repeats and farces:

Perhaps Senator McCain knew everything that has, with dizzying suddenness, emerged about his vice presidential pick, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska — that she was a director of a political committee in support of Ted Stevens, the Alaska senator now under indictment; an initial supporter of the so-called bridge to nowhere; an appointer of a man who had been officially reprimanded for sexual harassment as the public safety commissioner in Alaska; a mother of an unwed and pregnant 17-year-old; and other things being ferreted out by the minute. But it is an insult to Senator McCain’s intelligence to think even half of these or other matters were known to him before he chose her.

How Weakened Is The Army?

Steve Coll on Petraeus and the state of the Army:

The questions [asked of and answered by Petraeus] also touch upon a debate that is taking place within the Army over whether the counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may have degraded the U.S. military’s ability to carry out traditional combat—or what the document calls “high intensity force-on-force conflict.” Underlying this debate is a belief among some American and Israeli analysts that during the summer of 2006, when Israel entered into a conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the vaunted Israeli Defense Forces performed relatively poorly because they had been sapped by their long counterinsurgency campaigns in Gaza and the West Bank. Those occupations may have distracted the Israeli military from training and innovating in precision tactics such as artillery firing—a neglect that showed up in Lebanon, where the I.D.F. seemed surprised by Hezbollah’s defensive tactics, this line of analysis goes.

The current debate within the U.S. military concerns whether something similar may be happening to the U.S. Army.

A Fragile Calm

Jeffrey Goldberg interviews war correspondent Dexter Filkins about Iraq:

The progress here is remarkable. I came back to Iraq after being away for nearly two years, and honestly, parts of it are difficult for me to recognize. The park out in front of the house where I live–on the Tigris River–was a dead, dying, spooky place. It’s now filled with people–families with children, women walking alone, even at night. That was inconceivable in 2006. The Iraqis who are out there walking in the parks were making their own judgments that it is safe enough for them to go out for a walk. They’re voting with their feet. It’s a wonderful thing to see.

Having said that, it’s pretty clear that the calm is very fragile. The calm is built on a series of arrangements that are not self-sustaining; indeed, some of which, like the Sunni Awakening, are showing signs of coming apart. So the genie is back in the bottle, but I’m not sure for how long.

The Christianist Crusader

Palin is hard-core, judging from reports of her tenure as Mayor of Wasilla:

Vicki Naegele was the managing editor of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman at the time. "[defeated rival John Stein] figured he was just going to run your average, friendly small-town race," she recalls, "but it turned into something much different than that." Naegele held the same conservative Christian beliefs as Palin but didn’t think they had any place in local politics.

"I just thought, That’s ridiculous, she should concentrate on roads, not abortion," says Naegele…

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.