Run For Your Lives!

I know Samuel Johnson said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but I think he meant to replace "patriotism" with "Rudy Giuliani's New Hampshire ad." He just wasn't alive to see it. (Also, he wouldn't have had a chance unless he was living on the island of Guam, which I believe is central to Rudy's new "Win Guam and race to the nomination!" strategy.)

Never mind the fact that all of these challenges have grown worse under the tenure of George W. Bush, whose warmongering, imperialist foreign policy matches up best with Rudy's blood-red neocon vision. Never mind that the part where Osama bin Laden shows up only reminds you of the fact that he's still alive. But the ultimate chutzpah is that somehow, New York City's mayor is the guy who's "tested" and "ready" to deal with such a thing. Happening to be in a particular city on 9/11 does not a foreign policy résumé make, as the public is beginning to figure out.

Josh Marshall is thankful that Rudy's tanking in the polls is almost complete, and I agree with him. A country with this 30-second spot as the template for foreign policy is almost too horrific to contemplate, particularly when you consider the advisers (hello, Norman Podhoretz) ready to realize this nightmare. Apparently, you have to promise to exterminate the brutes in a nicer, more maverick-y way, like John McCain (who I agree is most likely to win by default at this point).

...oh, and just to comment on these new favorability ratings on St. McCain, he was lucky enough to be pummeled into dust early on, which means he hasn't had to withstand the same attacks and scrutiny recently as the rest of the GOP field. Plus the media has a hard-on for him. But there's still a year to the election, and plenty of time to recall "Bomb Bomb Iran" and hugging George Bush and all these ties to K Street, etc. Favorables have a way of fluctuating.

No Way Out

Kudos to the New York Times editorial board:

Without a serious effort at national conciliation, American troops are just holding down the lid on a pressure cooker. Iraq’s rival militias, the insurgents, the bitter sectarian resentments and the meddling neighbors haven’t gone anywhere. Consider this all too familiar horror: yesterday, police said they pulled six bodies from the Tigris River about 25 miles south of Baghdad. They were handcuffed and showed signs of having been tortured. And five, including a child, had been beheaded.

Perhaps 160,000 American troops could hold down the overall casualty numbers indefinitely, but they cannot wipe away that sort of hatred. That’s the job of Iraq’s leaders. Either way, the American military doesn’t have enough troops for such an occupation without end, and the American Treasury can’t keep spending $10 billion a month to maintain it.

Read the whole thing. And here's some more facts to add on to that informed opinion. First of all, these numbers being cited as a source of success are increasingly being generated by the unreliable Iraqi government.

And just as Iraqi forces have had a mixed record in fighting insurgents, they have been spotty at providing data from the regions where they have taken command.

Iraqi officials have been reporting far higher civilian death totals than those reported by U.S. forces, and aides to American commanders now acknowledge that the U.S. military probably had been undercounting such casualties.

We're also wearing out our welcome with Iraqi lawmakers, as treatment in the Green Zone and throughout the country becomes more violent and aggressive. At some point, the trade-off between providing security and humiliating the locals will become unsustainable. Plus, eventually there are going to be a lot of refugees flowing back into these ethnically cleansed areas, and there is absolutely no plan to deal with them.

The Iraqi government lacks a mechanism to settle property disputes if former residents return to Baghdad only to find that their homes are occupied, the officials said. Nor is it clear whether Iraqi authorities will be able to provide aid, shelter and other essential services to the thousands of Iraqis who might return. American commanders caution that if the return is not carefully managed, there is a risk of undermining the recent security gains.

“All these guys coming back are probably going to find somebody else living in their house,” said Col. William Rapp, a senior aide to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, speaking at a two-day military briefing on measuring military trends for a small group of American reporters in Baghdad.

“We have been asking, pleading with the government of Iraq to come up with a policy so it is not put upon our battalion commanders and the I.S.F. battalion commanders to figure it out on the ground,” he added, referring to the American and Iraqi security force commanders.

These conditions presage an eventual crumbling of a very fragile situation, and without political and diplomatic measures, we simply won't be able to keep that lid on.

NPR ran a very good piece this morning basically explaining that all the happy talk from Republican candidates about Iraq is almost completely irrelevant. They keep calling it a war against Islamofascism when it's actually a complex web of countervailing forces vying for power. Some think that Iraq will recede as a campaign issue, but that will only happen if the Democrats allow Republicans to get away with this blurring strategy. Iraq is still very dangerous, and we ignore that at our peril.

I Confess...

I put the figurative noose around David Horowitz' head. I conjured it up metaphorically, and before I knew it, he had imaginarily hung himself. I throw myself upon the mercy of the fake court.

Happy Islamofascism Awareness Week!

Did you get a tree yet?

That's right, self-promoter David Horowitz has inaugurated a series of events on college campuses to raise awareness of the greatest threat to humankind, evah! Actually, "series of events" is probably a big strong, since barely half of the campuses Horowitz claimed to be holding events actually are:

We contacted those institutions, alerting them to the fact that their name was being used, and wondering what exactly was taking place. … It’s important to note though, after we contacted those institutions, most of those institutions indicated that no such events is taking place on those campus. And many contacted the sponsors and told them, “do not use my institution’s name in your campaign,” including some very renowned universities such as Yale and Princeton.

This is the most embarrassing thing to hit campus since parachute pants.

The truth is that there's almost no evidence of a Islamic jihadist movement within the United States. To the extent that it exists in other countries, it was on the verge of being crushed immediately after 9-11 until we turned attention to Iraq and did nothing but rescusitate it after that. The "awareness" should be on how unseriously the White House took the threat before the attacks, and how much they've done to make America less safe on the global stage after it.

Some of these nutcases actually think that we're going to be forced to convert to Islam en masse, with the country transformed into a giant arm of the caliphate. That's ridiculous, the Cold War was about 50,000 times more dangerous than a group of fanatics in caves. We have made US citizens more vulnerable to attack, by keeping them in the middle of a civil war in Iraq, but the idea that we're about to be taken over by an Islamic theocracy is absurd. It's not going to happen. And we shouldn't let those who profit from fear to demagogue us into another bloody war:

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality...

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

Planet Neocon, Fareed. And you spent some time hanging out there, too, as I remember. But welcome back.

When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)

In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.

I'm glad some of the elites ar seeing the insanity of those who claim that Iran is about to strike us any minute and that some son of a blacksmith who runs the traffic lights in Tehran is "worse than Hitler":



The only reason Iran has any leverage at all on us is because we have 165,000 Americans stationed in the country next door. The "awareness" should focus on getting us out of there.