Libertarian Leanings

It's over

It's official.  The surge if over.  President Bush said so today.  The surge of roughly 30,000 troops to Iraq that he initiated last year has achieved significant gains.  While it is clear the war on terror is not over, the battle for Iraq is going very well.

All five brigades of surge troops returned home from Iraq in July, a month which saw violence drop to "its lowest level since the spring of 2004," Mr. Bush said. Pentagon numbers indicated that the 11 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq was actually the lowest monthly toll of the entire war.

Mr. Bush also announced that starting Friday, U.S. troops deployed to Iraq will serve 12-month tours instead of extended 15-month tours.

The president said that Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, will soon make recommendations on future troop levels, which he said will include "further reductions in our combat forces as conditions permit."

Not Iraq

The real front in the war on terror is Afghanistan, not Iraq.  So says Barack Obama.  Obama insists that U.S. troops should be redeployed away from Iraq so they can fight the war where it really is. 

Obama arrived in Iraq today after a weekend in Afghanistan, where increasing violence has caused concern.

Obama has said he wants to pull troops from Iraq and deploy them to Afghanistan.

"My argument would be we need to have some sort of time frame because we have to start planning if we want to get an additional two brigades in Afghanistan," he said. "We've got to start planning now.

"I said a year and a half ago that we needed more troops in Afghanistan -- at least two brigades," Obama said. "John McCain, at the time, didn't think that was necessary, and now there's a convergence around the notion that we need at least two and maybe three brigades in Afghanistan."

Over at the Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez disagrees. 

In the debate over whether America should have focused its initial response on uprooting al-Qaeda from Southwest Asia, one thing should not be forgotten. From it’s inception al-Qaeda’s center of gravity has been the the Middle East. It was the source of its money, leadership, ideology and manpower. Afghanistan’s importance from the beginning lay in what it could provide Bin Laden in terms of prestige he could parlay into into influence in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq.

Obama's focus on Afghanistan as a strategic goal seems to have come about by happenstance.  His original rationale for abandoning Iraq in favor of Afghanistan was his conviction that the "surge" was futile.  It wasn't.  What to do then?   How could he maintain a stance that opposed to McCain, Bush, and the Republicans if he conceded that the surge actually worked and that its gains should be built upon?  He did it by picking Afghanistan as his more pressing strategic goal.  But what can Obama realistically hope to accomplish in Afghanistan?

...it is in the Middle East — in Iraq — that the Islamic extremism has been most publicly defeated and humiliated; it is in Iraq where a dictatorial Arab regime has been overthrown. An ordinary observer might be forgiven for thinking the defeat of al-Qaeda right next door to Saudi Arabia was a great victory on strategic ground, which makes the efforts to ascribe improvements in Iraq to Moqtada al Sadr, Iran or the Anbar Sheiks even more puzzling. And as for Afghanistan, even Barack Obama could not seem to muster much of an argument for its strategic importance.  At a July 26, 2008 McClatchy Newspaper interview he said:

I’m not here to lay out a comprehensive military strategy. That’s the job of our commanders on the ground. I can tell you what our strategic goals should be. They should be relatively modest. We shouldn’t want to take over the country. We should want to get out of there as quickly as we can and help the Afghans govern themselves and provide for their own security. Our critical goal should be to make sure that the Taliban and al Qaida are routed and that they cannot project threats against us from that region. And to do that I think we need more troops. I also think that we need to deal with the situation in Pakistan and the fact that terrorists are able to operate with relative freedom of movement there right now.

This is a remarkable statement, a complete admission that even if he accomplished all he set out to do, he would not accomplish much. He doesn’t call for a defeat of the Taliban — which would be meaningless — and still less for dismantling of Islamic extremism. One can’t help thinking that Obama’s reason for redeploying to Afghanistan is because it is not Iraq. That is strategic vision of a sort, but of a very political kind.

Again...  What can Obama realistically hope to accomplish in Afghanistan?  Obama can hope to get elected President of the United States.  It's hard to notice anything else that matters to him.

Planetary politics

Nancy Pelosi is trying to save the planet.  So she says.

With fewer than 20 legislative days before the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1, the entire appropriations process has largely ground to a halt because of the ham-handed fighting that followed Republican attempts to lift the moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration. And after promising fairness and open debate, Pelosi has resorted to hard-nosed parliamentary devices that effectively bar any chance for Republicans to offer policy alternatives.

“I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet,” she says impatiently when questioned. “I will not have this debate trivialized by their excuse for their failed policy.”

Apparently she thinks the Republican party poses the greatest threat to planet Earth since global cooling was jettisoned in favor of global warming.  Warming, cooling, it doesn't matter which.  Republicans are to blame, so Nancy Pelosi fights them in every way she can.

Republicans are wondering why the California representative won't ask for investigations into Democratic Reps. Norm Dicks of Washington, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, James E. Clyburn of South Carolina and Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, all of whom face questions about accepting travel paid for by lobbyists.

"As we expressed in earlier letters, Madame Leader, it appears more and more that your repeated calls for an investigation of Mr. DeLay are more driven by politics than by any real concern for the House rules," Mr. McHenry, with two other Republicans, wrote in a letter to Mrs. Pelosi yesterday.

Despite urging from Republicans, Mrs. Pelosi refused to call for any investigations of her Democratic colleagues.

Anything goes.  It's a strategy has been one that works well for Democrats.  Demonize Republicans.  Stop them.  Save the children, house the homeless, and save the planet.  It all works beautifully when there is some nebulous "them" to save. 

Naturally we all want to save the planet.  But average Americans would not know the planet is in such dire need of saving without the left leaning media and Al Gore whipping us all into a frenzy over it.  You can't feel an average degree of temperature.  There have been record snowfalls of the last couple of winters.  That means you have to take it on faith that the planet is in danger.  Faith is about to be tested.  What happens when people can see for themselves that something has to be done.  Like, when you pull up to a gas pump. 

We've been saving the planet for over thirty years now.   No new oil refineries have been built, nor have there been any new nuclear power plants under construction.  Drilling for oil anywhere that there might be some is forbidden.  Even wind power is forbidden if someone should dare to produce it in Ted Kennedy's backyard. 

But there is now a slim chance the ban on drilling for domestic oil will be lifted, as Americans feel the pinch of ever increasing energy prices.  Ms. Pelosi herself pays lip service to the goal of reducing our dependency on foreign oil.  She may soon find herself in position to do something about it. 

On September 30 — two months from today — the ban on fossil-fuel drilling off America’s Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) and in the oil-shale fields of the West will expire. Democrats, who control both houses of Congress, must pass an appropriations bill extending the bans.

The onus, in other words, is on them. Democrats will likely propose a continuing resolution to extend funding for the government through the end of the calendar year without making major changes. This bill will certainly include a continuation of the drilling ban — Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), a zealous opponent of offshore drilling since the 1980s, has resisted all attempts to change it.

It's not the nebulous "them" who are feeling the pinch. The U.S. economy is taking a hit from higher energy costs, and those high costs can be traced back to Democratic policies and politics. 

If President Bush is willing to veto any appropriations bill that contains the drilling ban, he will give congressional Republicans a serious chance in their legislative fight against the provision. “The sense among Republicans has been that we won’t be able to do anything on drilling because we have to get 60 votes,” DeMint told me. “But if the president helps us, we can lift it with just 34 votes.” Judging by the president’s speech yesterday in Ohio, in which he serially challenged Congress to act on the OCS ban, on oil-shale development, and on opening ANWR — all in order to lower consumer energy prices — it appears for now that he’s in the Congressional minority’s corner.

Is it "them" or us? 

Free from politics

Jamie Gorelick is back with an editorial column in today's Washington Post.  She laments the politicization of the U.S. Department of Justice.

There was an unbroken rule, embodied in law, regulation and department policy, that no political questions would be asked of those who wanted to serve in career -- as opposed to political -- positions in the department. We demanded of our Justice Department, in its core prosecutorial and adjudicative functions, that it be separate from politics. Until the Bush administration.

The Post says of Ms. Gorelick, "The writer, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, is a partner at WilmerHale in Washington." What the Post does not say of Ms. Gorelick, is that she was the former Clinton administration deputy attorney general who was also a 9/11 commissioner.  That put Ms. Gorelick in the highly unusual position of investigating the activities of her former boss, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.  Since those activities occurred during Ms. Gorelick's own tenure at justice, by extension she was investigating herself.  Is it any surprise that nothing came out of the 9/11 commission investigation?  The Wall Street Journal had this to say about it.

We predicted Democrats would use the 9/11 Commission for partisan purposes, and that much of the press would oblige. But color us astonished that barely anyone appreciates the significance of the bombshell Attorney General John Ashcroft dropped on the hearings Tuesday. If Jamie Gorelick were a Republican, you can be sure our colleagues in the Fourth Estate would be leading the chorus of complaint that the Commission's objectivity has been fatally compromised by a member who was also one of the key personalities behind the failed antiterror policy that the Commission has under scrutiny. Where's the outrage?

At issue is the pre-Patriot Act "wall" that prevented communication between intelligence agents and criminal investigators--a wall, Mr. Ashcroft said, that meant "the old national intelligence system in place on September 11 was destined to fail." The Attorney General explained:

"In the days before September 11, the wall specifically impeded the investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. After the FBI arrested Moussaoui, agents became suspicious of his interest in commercial aircraft and sought approval for a criminal warrant to search his computer. The warrant was rejected because FBI officials feared breaching the wall.

"When the CIA finally told the FBI that al-Midhar and al-Hazmi were in the country in late August, agents in New York searched for the suspects. But because of the wall, FBI headquarters refused to allow criminal investigators who knew the most about the most recent al Qaeda attack to join the hunt for the suspected terrorists.

"At that time, a frustrated FBI investigator wrote headquarters, quote, 'Whatever has happened to this--someday someone will die--and wall or not--the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.' "

What's more, Mr. Ashcroft noted, the wall did not mysteriously arise: "Someone built this wall." That someone was largely the Democrats, who enshrined Vietnam-era paranoia about alleged FBI domestic spying abuses by enacting the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Mr. Ashcroft pointed out that the wall was raised even higher in the mid-1990s, in the midst of what was then one of the most important antiterror investigations in American history--into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. On Tuesday the Attorney General declassified and read from a March 4, 1995, memo in which Jamie Gorelick--then Deputy Attorney General and now 9/11 Commissioner--instructed then-FBI Director Louis Freeh and United States Attorney Mary Jo White that for the sake of "appearances" they would be required to adhere to an interpretation of the wall far stricter than the law required.

What great  good fortune for the Clinton administration that the person who should have been first up in the witness chair, explaining why intelligence services were unable to "connect the dots" was instead unavailable for questioning. 

And since she was one who got to ask questions we can understand how it is that Sandy Berger didn't face much in the way of questioning, either.  Sandy Berger, you may recall, was a Clinton administration national security adviser.  It seems he misplaced some classified documents he was reviewing at the National Archives as he prepared for his own testimony at the 9/11 commission hearings.  Perhaps misplaced is the wrong word.  I think "shredded" is the word, since that's actually what he did with them.

The deal's terms make clear that Berger lied last summer when he said that in 2003 he twice inadvertently walked off with copies of a classified document during visits to the National Archives, then later lost them.

He described the episode last summer as "an honest mistake." Yesterday, a Berger associate who declined to be identified by name but was speaking with Berger's permission said: "He recognizes what he did was wrong. ... It was not inadvertent."

Under terms, Berger has agreed to pay a $10,000 fine and accept a three-year suspension of his national-security clearance. A judge must accept these terms before they are final, but Berger's associates said he believes that closure is near on what has been an embarrassing episode during which he repeatedly misled people about what happened during two visits to the National Archives in September and October 2003.

Lanny Breuer, Berger's attorney, said in a statement: "Mr. Berger ... accepts complete responsibility for his actions, and regrets the mistakes he made during his review of documents at the National Archives."

The terms of Berger's agreement required him to acknowledge to the Justice Department the circumstances of the episode. Rather than misplacing or unintentionally throwing away three of the five copies he took from the archives, as the former national-security adviser earlier maintained, he shredded them.

The document, written by former National Security Council terrorism expert Richard Clarke, was prepared in early 2000 detailing the administration's actions to thwart terrorist attacks during the millennium celebration. It contained considerable discussion about the administration's awareness of the rising threat of attacks on U.S. soil.

Archives officials have said previously that Berger had copies only, and that no original documents were lost. It remains unclear whether Berger knew that, or why he destroyed only three of the five versions of a document.

Ah.  A mystery.  Why destroy only three of he five versions of a document?  Well, how about hand written notes?  There's a thought.  But I digress.

Regarding Ms. Gorelick's editorial column, her complaint is that the Bush administration sought to hire conservative leaning attorneys in their justice department.  Much the same as it preferred conservative justices, who interpret existing law rather than make it up as they go along, the Bush administration seems also to have preferred conservative prosecutors who might prosecute in an even handed manner. 

Ms. Gorelick would undoubtedly prefer some fine upstanding liberal, someone in the mold of former New York State Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer.  How fortunate we are that Ms. Gorelick, former official from that bastion of integrity the Clinton administration, is here to instruct us on the meaning of justice.  How fortunate she has the Washington Post to lend her the weight of its authority.

The ring of truth

The Washington Times reports that a massive campaign spending binge hasn't gotten Obama the bounce he was looking for.

The Obama campaign, flush with cash, is spending record amounts of money on big media buys in states like Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Colorado and Michigan, but the latest polls show that, if anything, the polling in these states has either changed little or the Arizona Republican has narrowed the gap in them.

McCain strategists told The Washington Times that they have been closely monitoring the large amounts of cash that Mr. Obama is spending on TV ads in these and a dozen other competitive states to see whether they were moving the Illinois senator's numbers in the race.

"So far we're not seeing any evidence that they have had any measurable impact," said a top McCain campaign official on the condition of anonymity.

McCain campaign officials say their own polls show that for all his spending, "Obama's numbers haven't budged a bit."

Instead, a Quinnipiac University poll of likely voters in four of these states, taken July 14 to 22, showed Mr. McCain has picked up support "in almost every group in every state, especially among independent voters and men," the polling group reported last week.

John McCain has made the Iraq war the centerpiece of his election campaign, convinced that it is the single most important issue that America faces.  While other candidates have treated the Iraq war as a political death wish, McCain has said said on several occasions that he would rather lose the campaign than the war.  As it turned out, it's been a winning campaign message.  According to the Washington Post reports McCain has turned up the heat. 

McCain, a supporter of the war in Iraq who later criticized the way it was waged and supported sending more troops there, said he based his own approach to the war on principle, while Obama developed a strategy aimed at appealing to voters. "I say that it was very clear that a decision had to be made, and I made it when it wasn't popular. He made a decision which was popular with his base. And that is a fundamental difference," McCain said in a taped interview on ABC.

He took his argument a step further on CNN, saying that Obama's support for a withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months would squander the efforts of Americans who died fighting the war there.

"I'm not prepared to see the sacrifice of so many brave young Americans lost because Senator Obama just views this war as another political issue with which he can change positions," McCain said.

McCain's new ad questions why Obama decided to exercise during a stopover in Germany late last week rather than visit wounded soldiers. In the ad, a narrator says that Obama "made time to go to the gym but canceled a visit with wounded troops." The ad continues: "Seems the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras. John McCain is always there for our troops. McCain -- country first."

The effectiveness of McCain's ad campaign remains to be seen, but the reaction from the Obama campaign argues that it will be a winner. 

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said that McCain is not living up to the standards he set out at the outset of the general-election campaign, when he repeatedly called for a "civil" and "respectful" debate. "John McCain is an honorable man running an increasingly dishonorable campaign," Vietor said. "I think a lot of people are wondering what happened to the civil campaign John McCain said he was going to run."

In fact Obama's position is indefensible.  Obama went on record to oppose any attempt to win the war when he opposed the surge that won it.  Now even the New York Times and the Associated Press concede that the war is won, but Obama still urges that we lose it by promising to withdraw troops according to a 16-month timetable.  The Obama campaign has no choice but to attack McCain's "civility"  or else try and defend the indefensible.

Who is this guy?

That is the question.  Or so one might think, and so says John Weaver, formerly a top political strategist for Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain. 

McCain lost the week badly, let's be honest," Weaver said in a message on Friday. "John [McCain] is still in striking distance, thanks to his own character, biography and memories of the McCain of previous election cycles. But he cannot afford another week like this one."

Alex Castellanos, another Republican strategist, agreed that Obama had acquitted himself well overseas. " 'Barack goes global' is working," he noted. But he sounded a cautionary note, nonetheless. Obama, unlike McCain, he said, remains a work in progress who is still trying to answer the question, "Who is this guy?"

But as Barack Obama's Campaign 2008 World Tour comes to a close, adoring reporters including Dan Balz of the Washington Post, really don't care who he is.  They wonder instead, will it work and get him elected president?  He should be pulling away.  Why isn't he?

Given the mismatch between the Obama and McCain campaigns over the past week, the other question for Obama is why the race for president remains as relatively close as it does. Obama said he believes that is because voters still have enough questions to keep them from committing.

There are reasons voters still have questions.  While the trip was fraught with imagery and grandeur, there was little in the way of substance.

Substantively, the trip left questions for Obama. He struggled to square his opposition to the troop buildup in Iraq with the successes he witnessed and talked about. Obama initially said the buildup might even increase violence. Now that it has helped produce the opposite, McCain, rather than Obama, can claim he had superior judgment.

Not to worry.  Obama's World Tour 2008 came to a close without any major gaffes.  One minor mishap that occurred was dutifully ignored by the enraptured press corps. 

The trip went smoothly save for one flap with the Pentagon over a planned visit by Obama to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Pentagon officials raised concerns about campaign aspects of the visit, and Obama's team scrubbed it, then tried to explain what they had been told that forced them to back away.

Looking for an opening, McCain accused Obama in a new ad of "going to the gym" while in Germany instead of visiting the wounded troops, and of doing so because the hospitals would not let television cameras film the event.

McCain said in an interview to be aired Sunday morning on ABC's "This Week" program that "if I had been told by the Pentagon that I couldn't visit those troops, and I was there and wanted to be there, I guarantee you, there would have been a seismic event," according to the Associated Press.

And that was the whole of his trip -- no gaffes.  Substance is extraneous for a candidate of the left.  With Obama image is literally everything, and he promises that image will carry the day.  Adoring crowds were proof of it.

The message Obama hoped to send was that, after eight years of President Bush and rising anti-American sentiment in many countries, the United States could have a president the rest of the world admires.

"What I thought was useful was to give the American people some sense of how I was approaching these issues, but also to give them a sense that the world can be responsive to this approach and that it will make a difference," Obama said.

"[French President Nicolas] Sarkozy is much more likely to be able to provide more troop support in Afghanistan if his voters are favorably disposed towards us," he added.

We must forget that the elections of two distinctly pro-American heads of state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, argue that anti-American sentiment is not on the rise.  We must also ignore that the only sense we've ever gotten of Obama's approach to issues is how he constantly and invariably adjusts his positions to fit the moment. 

No gaffes, but no substance.

The occasion had been taken as an invitation to deliver a summary of Obama's view of America's role in the world. When his handlers decided to schedule a speech in Berlin, they teed up comparisons with the portentous speeches that Presidents Kennedy and Reagan had delivered there.

Instead, in the heart of Europe, before 200,000 breathless admirers, Obama pulled himself up to his full height, lifted his chin, unlimbered those eloquent hands, and said nothing at all.

Who is this guy?  Who cares?  Certainly not the press corps.

Gains for McCain

While the media follow along like adoring groupies behind Democrat Barack Obama on his campaign world tour, Republican presidential candidate John McCain has been gaining ground.  The Washington Post reports, McCain Makes Significant Gains in Four Key Battleground States.

By Chris Cillizza
washingtonpost.com staff writer
Thursday, July 24, 2008; 10:00 AM

Republican John McCain has quickly closed the gap between himself and Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama in several key battleground states even as the Arizona senator struggles to break through the wall-to-wall coverage of Obama's trip to Europe and the Middle East this week.

As McCain has made inroads in those battleground states, so have Republican Senate candidates.

A month ago, Obama led McCain among Independents by anywhere from 21 points (Minnesota) to eight points (Michigan). In the most recent set of data, McCain actually outperforms Obama by three points among independents in Michigan while losing that crucial voting bloc far more narrowly in Colorado (Obama +8), Minnesota (Obama +8) and Wisconsin (Obama +9).

Two of the states in the battleground surveys -- Minnesota and Colorado -- are also playing host to high profile Senate races. In each, the news is good for Republicans.

In Minnesota, Sen. Norm Coleman has built a 53 percent to 38 percent edge over entertainer Al Franken ¿ thanks in no small part to a series of gaffes by the former "Saturday Night Live" star. In Colorado, former Rep. Bob Schaffer (R) has pulled into a dead heat with Rep. Mark Udall (D), an affirmation of Republicans' insistence that the contest will be among the closest in the country.

I tried to find out what series of gaffes Post reporter Chris Cillizza was taking about.  No luck.  You'd think there was a some sort of media bias at work here. 

In spite of the bias things look less bad for Republicans as we head toward the conventions, but a lot can happen between now and November.  One of the things that I hope will happen, is that McCain makes Obama the issue.  Obama's position on the surge has evolved.  He once said it would never work, the war in Iraq can't be won.

Moran noted that Obama had claimed that the surge "would not make a significant dent in the violence."

Responded Obama: "In the violence in Iraq overall, right. So the point that I was making at the time was that the political dynamic was the driving force between that sectarian violence. And we could try to keep a lid on it, but if these underlining dynamic continued to bubble up and explode the way they were, then we would be in a difficult situation. I am glad that in fact those political dynamic shifted at the same time that our troops did outstanding work."

"But," asked Moran,"if the country had pursued your policy of withdrawing in the face of this horrific violence, what do you think Iraq would look like now?"

Obama said it would be hard to speculate.

That was then, this is now, and we have a new conventional wisdom: The war in Iraq can't be lost. 

The reality is that neither Barack Obama nor Nouri al-Maliki nor most anybody else believes that the Iraq war can be "lost" at this point.

Whatever the conditions on the ground or the outcome of the battles, Barack Obama insists he is right to argue for withdrawal of the troops.  But it's not about the surge, it's about him.  He is the issue.  Who can possibly have faith in Obama's judgment after that exhibition? 

Rejected

In the most extraordinary editorial move I've ever heard of, the New York Times has rejected an editorial column by Republican presidential candidate John McCain.  McCain submitted his column to rebut an earlier one submitted by his opponent Democrat Barack Obama which was not rejected by the Times.  Drudge has the story.

NYT REJECTS MCCAIN'S EDITORIAL; SHOULD 'MIRROR' OBAMA
Mon Jul 21 2008 12:00:25 ET

An editorial written by Republican presidential hopeful McCain has been rejected by the NEW YORK TIMES -- less than a week after the paper published an essay written by Obama, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

The paper's decision to refuse McCain's direct rebuttal to Obama's 'My Plan for Iraq' has ignited explosive charges of media bias in top Republican circles.

'It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama's piece,' NYT Op-Ed editor David Shipley explained in an email late Friday to McCain's staff. 'I'm not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written.'

According to Drudge, the aforementioned New York Times Op-Ed editor Shipley was a Special Assistant and Senior Presidential Speechwriter for Hillary Clinton's husband Bill from 1995 to 1997. 

I can only conclude that panic is beginning to set in on the Democrats as fear of an imminent implosion in the Obama campaign.  Senator McCain has been hammering the point that Obama has been dead wrong in all of his assessments of the situation in Iraq. 

McCain writes in the rejected essay: 'Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. 'I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,' he said on January 10, 2007. 'In fact, I think it will do the reverse.'

For a major news organization to flatly refuse to publish a piece from a presidential candidate during a heated election campaign is beyond bizarre.  Shipley offered this explanation of it:

'The Obama piece worked for me because it offered new information (it appeared before his speech); while Senator Obama discussed Senator McCain, he also went into detail about his own plans.'

Shipley continues: 'It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama's piece. To that end, the article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq.'

McCain's editorial is presented in its entirety on Drudge.  I take the liberty of presenting it here as well:

In January 2007, when General David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80% to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.

Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said on January 10, 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse."

Now Senator Obama has been forced to acknowledge that “our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence.” But he still denies that any political progress has resulted.

Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City—actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism.

The success of the surge has not changed Senator Obama’s determination to pull out all of our combat troops. All that has changed is his rationale. In a New York Times op-ed and a speech this week, he offered his “plan for Iraq” in advance of his first “fact finding” trip to that country in more than three years. It consisted of the same old proposal to pull all of our troops out within 16 months. In 2007 he wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost. If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance.

To make this point, he mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

Senator Obama is also misleading on the Iraqi military's readiness. The Iraqi Army will be equipped and trained by the middle of next year, but this does not, as Senator Obama suggests, mean that they will then be ready to secure their country without a good deal of help. The Iraqi Air Force, for one, still lags behind, and no modern army can operate without air cover. The Iraqis are also still learning how to conduct planning, logistics, command and control, communications, and other complicated functions needed to support frontline troops.

No one favors a permanent U.S. presence, as Senator Obama charges. A partial withdrawal has already occurred with the departure of five “surge” brigades, and more withdrawals can take place as the security situation improves. As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields, such as Afghanistan, without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I have said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.

But I have also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground, not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons. This is the crux of my disagreement with Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his “plan for Iraq.” Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be “very dangerous.”

The danger is that extremists supported by Al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback, as they have in the past when we’ve had too few troops in Iraq. Senator Obama seems to have learned nothing from recent history. I find it ironic that he is emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the “Mission Accomplished” banner prematurely.

I am also dismayed that he never talks about winning the war—only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president. Instead I will continue implementing a proven counterinsurgency strategy not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan with the goal of creating stable, secure, self-sustaining democratic allies.

It is slowly becoming clear that the establishment of a free and democratic Iraq is likely to be the greatest American victory since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  I expect Democrats and the media to pay a heavy price for their continuing absence from reality.

Some foreign policy "disaster"

Buried on page A12 of the Sunday Washington Post was a story about Iraq.  It said the largest Sunni political bloc, the Accordance Front, has rejoined the Iraqi government. 

Sunni Bloc Rejoins Iraqi Government, Amid Reconciliation Hopes

By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 20, 2008; Page A12

BAGHDAD, July 19 -- Iraq's largest Sunni political bloc rejoined the government Saturday after a nearly year-long boycott, a move that could help bridge the country's sectarian divide.

The return of the Iraqi Accordance Front is widely seen as a victory for Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his efforts to portray himself as a nationalist leader uninfluenced by sectarian pressures.

"It means the success of the political process and the success of the security situation and of reconciliation," said Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of the bloc.

You might think this kind of news would rate more prominent coverage, since reconciliation is one of those benchmarks that our Democratic congressional majority has been studiously unable to discover evidence of.  It seems Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's crackdown on Shiite militias in Basra and Baghdad convinced Accordance Front leaders that their party's continued absence from the government would heighten the risk that a Shiite led sectarian government might emerge in Iraq. But the crackdown and a recent the release of thousands of detained Sunnis brought the Accordance Front back.

Quite obviously the Washington Post shares Democratic party embarrassment and denial over recent developments in Iraq.  But the Post is, after all, a news organization and it would never do for a news organization not to report news, especially news of this importance.  However, in typical fashion the Post greets any progress towards Iraqi reconciliation with skepticism and relegates it to the back pages. 

The Post simply cannot get past its own partisanship.  Here we have a brand new Arab democracy arising before us in the heart of the Middle East, but it barely gets mention.  It wasn't that long ago that news from Iraq dominated Post front pages.  Of course, in those days it was news of a different sort. 

Tipping Point for War's Supporters?
In Past Month, Even Stalwarts Have Called for Change in Iraq Policy

By Thomas E. Ricks and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 29, 2006; Page A01

As the fighting in Iraq swerved toward civil war in February, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) expressed "a high degree of confidence" that a new government would take charge and that by the end of the year the conflict "won't be the same."

As October opened, Warner returned from Iraq with a far grimmer assessment.

In those days, heady days for Washington Post prognosticators, the Bush Administration was "searching for a way out."  Like vultures on the death watch, journalists and Democrats waited for the troop pullout to begin, calling the invasion of Iraq the "worst foreign policy mistake" in U.S. history.  But instead of a pullout, reinforcements were sent over and the series of operations that became known as "the surge" began.  Which brings us to where we are today.

Violence is way down, the Iraqi economy is booming, Iraqi oil production has exceeded pre-war levels, al Qaeda has been dealt a near fatal defeat in Iraq, and regional elections are on schedule for this fall.  Still, electioneering Democrats and their enablers in the media try to pretend that the we are witnessing the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history.  Here is an excerpt from a recent article by one Steve Kettmann who co-wrote a book with Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat from West Virginia.

(07-10) 04:00 PDT Berlin -- When it comes to her public standing at home and in the rest of the world, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has pushed the Wile E. Coyote approach to the limit: She long ago hurled over the edge of the cliff and ought to have plunged into the depths of ignominy and infamy, but instead continues to hang in the air - and does it all with her patented Cheshire Cat smile in place.

For that, we should give Rice some credit. She has both accurately assessed and gained from a major change in the way we think of foreign policy. Results used to matter. A nation's top diplomat was graded based on the success or failure of a country's foreign-policy initiatives. By that standard, Rice would currently be pulling a D-minus - she was at the table for all the major decisions leading up to both the botched campaign in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, twin debacles that - banal happy talk aside - inescapably rank among the worst foreign-policy disasters in U.S. history.  (my emphasis)

Meanwhile the Democrats' presumptive nominee for president has gone to the Middle East with the hope of mitigating the worst strategic mistake a political party could make.  Democrats are now faced with prospect that American voters will decide if Iraq has been a foreign policy disaster right after Iraqis go to the polls in their regional elections.  Will Iraqi elections bear out those claims that liberation was a foreign policy mistake?  Quite the contrary, in reality the establishment of a truly democratic Iraq, not to mention a Democratic Afghanistan, represents a victory of astounding proportions.  Huge problems for the Democrats will arise as more and more voters come to realize that had we acceded to Democrats' demands, that victory would never have happened. 

Fortunately for Democrats, the Washington Post is doing all it can to shield U.S. its readers from ever having to face this realization.  Unfortunately for the Post, American voters know what the Post is trying to do.

The price of oil

That didn't take long.  On the subject of domestic oil production liberals and leftists invariably argue that any move to increase it today will have no impact until some time in the distant future. Therefore, they say, there is no point in doing anything. Recent events would suggest that they are wrong about that.

Earlier this week President George W. Bush lifted the executive order that prohibited drilling for oil on the outer continental shelf.  The ban had been put in place by his father, President George H.W. Bush, in 1992.

I call on the House and the Senate to pass good legislation as soon as possible. This legislation should give the states the option of opening up OCS resources off their shores, provide a way for the federal government and states to share new leasing revenues, and ensure that our environment is protected. There's also an executive prohibition on exploration in the OCS. When Congress lifts the legislative ban, I will lift the executive prohibition.

Next Bush announced the release of 3.9 million acres of land in Alaska for drilling and exploration.  The impact of his announcements was almost immediate. 

The Bush administration didn’t waste much time after its lifting of the executive ban on off-shore drilling to make its second big gesture towards the oil markets.  Late yesterday, the Bureau of Land Management opened 3.9 million acres of land in Alaska for drilling and exploration.  The land had already been reserved for petroleum production, but had been kept in limbo by complaints and legal action by environmentalists:

The US federal government on Wednesday said it would open 3.9m acres of land in a designated petroleum reserve in Alaska for drilling as a means to help curb rising petrol prices. …

Along with an immediate drop in oil prices we witnessed a reversal of the stock market's trend toward bear market territory.  As the price of oil went down, the Dow went up.

Stocks rallied sharply for a second straight day on Thursday as the financial sector continued to soar and oil's losses piled up, boosting investors' mood further as the afternoon wore on.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was recently higher by about 197 points at 11436.07, helped by a 12% jump in component J.P. Morgan Chase. The bank disclosed a 53% drop in second-quarter net income, but still managed to beat analysts' expectations. Shares of other giant banks grabbed their competitors' coattails. Bank of America jumped more than 14% and Citigroup rose almost 8%.

The blue-chip average is up more than 450 points since Wednesday's opening bell and appears poised to post its best two-day gain since late November.

[...]

Oil prices were on the verge of a third straight day of steep losses. After an early rally, crude futures for August delivery were recently down nearly $5 a barrel in New York as traders sold contracts to settle expiring options bets.

That was yesterday.  Today according to Fox News the Dow continues to rise, but at a slower pace, while the price of oil rebounded slightly to just over $130 per barrel.

On the energy front, crude oil futures rebounded from their string of selloffs. Crude was up $1.00 to $130.29 a barrel in recent trading. However, oil prices plunged $16 over the prior three days, the largest three-day dollar losses ever. On a percentage basis, its the largest losses since 2003.

The price of oil fell when President Bush showed his determination to boost oil production in the U.S. and then backed his words with action.  Not a drop of new petroleum hit the market but the price went down anyway.  Expectations drive the market, and the expectation is we will produce more oil.  Increasing supply will put downward pressure on prices and the economy will benfit by the creation of new jobs.  It's about time.