Libertarian Leanings

A will to win

Brilliant Democratic senate strategists, who have thus far failed to bring about a U.S. defeat in Iraq in spite of all their efforts, have a new plan.  More accurately it's a new talking point. 

A series of questioners put on the airs of grand strategic sophisticates to remind Petraeus that whereas his brief includes only Iraq, theirs covers the entire world--and from their viewpoint, the fight that matters is not the one that Petraeus and Crocker and their subordinates are winning in Iraq, but the one in the "Afghan-Pakistan border region," as it was so often called. Petraeus and Crocker pointed out repeatedly and accurately that al Qaeda's leaders themselves continually refer to Iraq as the central front in their war against us, but to no avail. The real fight, they were told each time, is in the Afghan-Pakistan border region against the real al Qaeda that the Intelligence Community says has only grown stronger. And, the general and the ambassador were lectured, keeping too many troops in Iraq was preventing the United States from prevailing in this more important fight.

All that Democratic bluster might lead one the think there is some will to win the fight against al Qaeda on that side of the aisle.  One would be mistaken.  In fact, there are some things the Senate can do to help in Afghanistan.  Oddly enough, the Senate would rather not help.

To the question, "Is there really nothing we can do unless we send more troops?" the answer is unequivocally that there is something we can do. Congress can do it, in fact, and very quickly. Pass the supplemental defense appropriation that would allow development money to flow reliably to our soldiers in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. The advantage of Afghanistan's poverty (for us) is that a little money goes a long way. American soldiers have increasingly been leveraging development funds to starve the insurgency of recruits in a way similar to what has worked in Iraq (but tailored appropriately to conditions in Afghanistan). They need more money. One of the problems the British face in the south of the country is that their government does not give their soldiers development money to spend. We should find ways to help them out. Congress could do all of this with one roll-call vote in each house, and the aid would start flowing to Afghanistan faster than any additional brigades could arrive. American soldiers in Iraq often say that dollars are their best bullets--the same is true in Afghanistan.

Democratic Senators prefer to delay action on the supplemental defense appropriation.  They still hope to force a withdrawal from Iraq.  There is a will to win among them.  Unfortunately, an American victory in Iraq is not a win for them.  Quite the opposite.  And Senate Democrats work towards a victory of their own.

Moqtada al Sadr

Dan Senor and Roman Martinez, Bush administration foreign policy advisers who were based in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004, point out how little we hear of Moqtada al Sadr these days.  At one time al Sadr had been considered the most dangerous man in Iraq -- by Newsweek.

Newsweek's 2006 profile had predicted that "the longer the American occupation lasts, the less popular America gets -- and the more popular Sadr and his ilk become." But as a recent ABC News poll of Iraqis makes clear, Shiite support for local militias has plummeted over the past year. The full implementation of the surge helped weaken Sadr, not make him more popular.

To be sure, Sadr's diminished capacity to stir up trouble may not last forever. While he has not appeared in public in close to a year, he still has his family name and a base of support among the Shiite underclass, particularly in Baghdad. He may be biding his time, hoping a U.S. withdrawal will leave him with a weaker opponent in the fledgling Iraqi security services. And as this week's deadly suicide bombing of a Shiite shrine in Karbala indicates, the security threats that enabled the Mahdi Army's rise to power have not yet been fully defeated.

So while the progress made against Sadr has been remarkable, it may also be fragile. Sustaining it means recognizing that political progress depends fundamentally on security.

Oddly enough, Moqtada has been the hope of the anti-war left, including anti-war Democrats, but he has failed them.  He said so himself.

I have failed to liberate Iraq, and transform its society into an Islamic society."
-- Moqtada al-Sadr, Asharq Al Awsat newspaper, March 8, 2008

A few years earlier, however, he had come very close to succeeding.  Senor and Martinez describe how.

Moqtada al-Sadr came very close to establishing a state within a state inside Iraq, much like Hezbollah had done in Lebanon.

It began in 2003, when Sadr's followers orchestrated the murder of Majid al-Khoie, a moderate Shiite cleric whom the U.S. government had hoped could play a pivotal role in building a democratic Iraq. It continued with a series of armed uprisings across the south in April 2004, which took the lives of scores of American troops, and led to the collapse of Iraq's fledgling security forces. These culminated in a dramatic standoff against the Iraqi government and U.S. forces at the Holy Shrines in August 2004. In 2005 and 2006 Sadr expanded his territorial reach, using his militia to expel Sunnis from their Baghdad neighborhoods and massively infiltrating the Iraqi police forces.

In areas under his control, Sadr set up extrajudicial Sharia courts to administer justice against Iraqi Shiite "heretics." Large numbers of citizens found guilty were punished by death.

That description by Senor and Martinez is exactly what anti-war Democrats still hope to achieve with their continuing insistence on a U.S pullout from Iraq.

Pelosi insists

Nancy Pelosi insists that Iraq is a failure.  She has no choice, really. With the presidential election jackpot less than a year away Democrats have too little time to hedge their political bet on a U.S. defeat in Iraq.  They're sticking to their story.

Pelosi’s harsh verdict is a reminder of the dilemma for Democrats as they head into this fall’s presidential and congressional elections:

They need to make the case that the country needs to depart from the direction set by Bush. Yet they don’t want to look like naysayers at a time when Iraq has become more stable, albeit still violent.

Democrats insist that they will do a more effective job of fighting al Qaeda by pulling out of Iraq, presumably to fight them somewhere else.  However, documents captured from al Qaeda in Iraq contradict them.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an “extraordinary crisis”. Last year's mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight”. The terrorist group's security structure suffered “total collapse”.

These are the words not of al-Qaeda's enemies but of one of its own leaders in Anbar province — once the group's stronghold. They were set down last summer in a 39-page letter seized during a US raid on an al-Qaeda base near Samarra in November.

The US military released extracts from that letter yesterday along with a second seized in another November raid that is almost as startling.

That second document is a bitter 16-page testament written last October by a local al-Qaeda leader near Balad, north of Baghdad. “I am Abu-Tariq, emir of the al-Layin and al-Mashahdah sector,” the author begins. He goes on to describe how his force of 600 shrank to fewer than 20.

Via Drudge.

Torturous hypocrisy

From the Wall Street Journal:

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri planned the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Abu Zubaydah was the mastermind of the foiled millennium terrorist attacks, which had Los Angeles airport as one of its targets. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed directed the September 11 attacks, and has claimed to have personally beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl.

All three men were captured by the CIA in 2002 and waterboarded in the course of their interrogations. They are also the only U.S. detainees to have been waterboarded. That fact, publicly confirmed yesterday by CIA Director Michael Hayden, shreds whatever is left to the so-called torture narrative, according to which the Bush Administration has engaged in widespread, needless and systematic torture of detainees.

Instead, we have sworn public testimony that the waterboarding was conducted against the three individuals best positioned to know about impending terrorist atrocities. The interrogations took place when a second major terrorist attack was widely seen as inevitable. And we know that the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah helped lead to the capture of KSM, and to the foiling of an active terrorist plot against the United States.

The waterboarding was conducted by intelligence professionals who understood they were operating not only with the approval of the Justice Department but also the informed consent of key Congressional leaders, including Democrat Jay Rockefeller, then the ranking minority Member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Funding approved in the Senate

Last night the Senate approved a $555 billion omnibus spending bill that includes $70 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  There were no timetables for troop withdrawals in the bill.

Democrats had vowed only weeks ago to withhold any Iraq-specific money unless strict timelines for troop withdrawal were established, but they instead chose, on a 70 to 25 vote, to remove what appeared to be the final obstacle to sending the spending bill to the White House, where Bush has indicated he will sign it. Senators then passed the omnibus bill, 76 to 17.

The House must still approve the revised spending bill, with the unrestricted war funds, but Democrats there concede the measure is likely to pass behind strong Republican support.

Tortured Congressional leadership

According to San Francisco Impeach Now, "The Only Way to Stop the Bush/Cheney Torture Program Is to Cut it out at its Rotten Core."

It should be apparent by now that there is only one thing that will have much of an effect on Bush administration torture policies and actions. Confirmation fights over Attorney General or any other office are the equivalent of trying to restore a tree to life by cutting off its branches when the whole tree is rotten to the core. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are the rotten core of the most corrupt presidential administration in U.S. history. The only action that has any reasonable chance of terminating the Bush/Cheney torture policies is the impeachment and removal from office of the rotten core itself.

To make that point one need only consider how Bush administration torture policies have played out over time – how refractory they have been to any Congressional efforts to maintain oversight over them or reign them in.

It so happens, today's Wall Street Journal has some commentary on just that subject -- Congressional oversight.  It comes in the wake of media hyperventilation over CIA's destruction of videotapes in 2005 of the "harsh" interrogation of two terrorists.  It turns out that key members of Congress, including the then future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were fully briefed by the CIA about those interrogation techniques, including waterboarding.  Indignation was not the order of the day.

Porter Goss, the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee who later served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006 is explicit about what happened in these meetings: "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing. And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."

In all, the CIA provided Congress with some 30 briefings on waterboarding before it became a public issue...

...What one may not do -- at least not if one wants the system to function -- is assent to such a policy in 2002 and then, when the policy is made public, put up the pretense that one is "shocked" and appalled to learn of it.

I beg to differ.  Time and again we've seen that one may do exactly that -- pretend to be shocked -- when one is a Democrat operating with cover from a sympathetic media.  They do it all the time.  But it means, given the chance, they will govern by opinion poll.  In Democratic parlance, that's leadership.  Find out which way the public thinks it wants to go, then run to the front of the parade in hopes of getting wherever it may be first.  Then Democrats will have lead the way. 

It's a strategy that will work wonderfully for the folks at San Francisco Impeach Now. 

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said.

In actuality, Congress could have explicitly outlawed waterboarding but chose not to do so.  And now it comes to light that there were no mysterious opinions or secret techniques.  The Democratic leadership in Congress knew all along what was going on.  But in their rush to the head of the parade they seem to have miscalculated.  The media didn't cover for them quite as well as they had thought.  Not to worry, though.  Another opinion poll will be coming along soon.  Democrats can glean their new policy from that, and all that went before will be forgotten.

The surge - according to Murtha

"I think the 'surge' is working."  So said Representative John Murtha, Democrat from Pennsylvania.

WASHINGTON -- U.S. Rep. John Murtha, one of the most outspoken congressional critics of the Iraq war, yesterday said he saw signs of significant military progress during a brief trip to the Middle East last week. But he warned that Iraqis need to play a larger role in providing their own security and the Bush administration must develop an exit strategy.

"I think the 'surge' is working," Mr. Murtha, a Democrat, said in a video conference from his Johnstown office, describing the president's decision to commit nearly 30,000 additional troops at the beginning of the year. "But the thing that has to happen is the Iraqis have to do this themselves. We can't win it for them."

Mr. Murtha has been a strong critic of the White House war policy and has been calling for a troop withdrawal plan.

Various blogs like Captain's Quarters, Power Line, and Politico have speculated that Murtha's abrupt turnabout will hurt Democratic chances of forcing a troop withdrawal.  That would leave Murtha open to the wrath of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  It comes as no surprise then, that he has issued a clarification.

Murtha, one of the most powerful House Democrats when it comes to war funding, gave qualified but likely his most glowing remarks Thursday about the Iraq war.

"I think the surge is working, but that's only one element," said Murtha, who chairs the defense appropriations subcommittee. "And the surge is working for a couple of different reasons. And one reason is the increase in troops."

On Friday, however, Murtha's office moved to clarify his seemingly positive take on the surge, this time putting it in the context of renewed criticism of the administration.

"The military surge has created a window of opportunity for the Iraqi government," Murtha's statement read. "Unfortunately, the sacrifice of our troops has not been met by the Iraqi government and they have failed to capitalize on the political and diplomatic steps that the surge was designed to provide.

"The fact remains that the war in Iraq cannot be won militarily, and that we must begin an orderly redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq as soon as practicable."

They must have had a chat, Pelosi and Murtha. And well they should.  There is no question that Democratic prospects for promoting a U.S. defeat in Iraq have taken a hit.  Rasmussen reports a rising confidence in the American public that we are winning the war on terror.  As we move through the primary season into summer, the voting public will be presented with a slate of Republican presidential candidates who will be aggressively campaigning on a platform of winning the war in Iraq and winning the war on terror.  By that time Democratic contortions on the issue should be pretty entertaining.

Expect another one

In the Weekly Standard article, The Stab That Failed, Noemie Emery grades the congressional Democrats' surge-against-the-surge a failure.

The depth of the left's investment in an Iraq defeat came out during the last week in July, when, hearing from General Jack Keane that the surge might be working, Representative Nancy Boyda was so shaken she fled a congressional hearing. "There was only so much that you could take until we in fact had to leave the room for a while," she explained. "Democrats like Boyda would like to preserve in amber the state of public opinion that prevailed during the 2006 election and the first half of this year," noted Michael Barone. "The more cynical among them want to make political gain from that; the less cynical want to end a conflict that is taking American lives as fast as they can." Democrats claim that their motives are pure, but it is a strange form of patriotic dissent that attacks a plan as having failed before it has started, anoints a commander, attacks him, and then tries to sandbag his efforts; calls a plan a failure in April when it has been explained many times that it will be June before it can be implemented, and then, when qualified observers see some signs of progress, either collapses in an attack of the vapors or erupts in howls of unrelieved rage.

Since then, the Democrats have moved on to controlling nondamage; i.e., putting the worst face on good news.

Ms. Emery's article is subtitled, "a case study in political futility." She gives a blow by blow account of Democrats' failed efforts over the last year to scuttle the mission in Iraq. But it's not over yet.  Among the lessons of Vietnam there is this: It's never too late to surrender.

Here's a pop quiz about Vietnam. When the 94th United States Congress finally pulled the plug on American support, how many of our GIs were still fighting in Vietnam? The question was posed to us the other evening by Secretary of State Kissinger, full of sagacity and wisdom 30 years after the events in question. We guessed somewhere on the order of 100,000, down from the more than half a million American military personnel who had been in Vietnam at the height of the fighting. But Mr. Kissinger had us.

It turns out that when the Congress pulled the plug on Vietnam, the number of our U.S. troops in Vietnam was zero. When, in the 1974 elections, the Democrats widened their majority in the Congress and then, in the spring of 1975, finally defied President Ford and ended support for the free Vietnamese government in the South, the number of GIs was something on the order of two or three dozen, mostly embassy guards.

This is something to think about as the Democrats maneuver against a war-time president over funding for our GIs and our ally in a free Iraq. It turns out that when one looks at the time-line of the betrayal of South Vietnam, one of the lessons is that, in the end, it was not about our GIs and the loss of American lives, great though that treasure was.

Reid and Pelosi have said they will keep trying, and I think we can count on that.  This latest stab may have failed as Ms. Emery writes, but it won't be the last stab.

Senate fails to pass timetable for defeat

The Senate failed to pass an emergency appropriations bill that the Washington Post reports would have required President Bush to begin pulling troops out of Iraq immediately.  The bill is little more than an opportunity for congressional Democrats to posture.   

In May, Bush vetoed a war spending bill for Iraq that contained Democratic withdrawal conditions, and Congress backed off. Reid and Pelosi said they will not consider a new approach to the funding request until January. In the meantime, they said, the Pentagon could draw from its $471 billion annual budget to cover war expenses...

The Democratic terms that did not win enough support yesterday are less stringent than the ones in previous measures. For example, the current bill would have set a goal, instead of a deadline, for withdrawal.

In fact, according to Rasmussen the measure hasn't much in the way of public support.  A national telephone survey found that only 40% of those polled would favor a cut off of funding to force President Bush to redeploy the troops.

Fifty-three percent (53%) of voters say they want U.S. combat troops out of Iraq by the end of 2008. However, a Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 40% want Congress to cut off funding if the President won’t go along with the plan. Fifty percent (50%) are opposed to Congress using the purse strings in this manner while 10% are not sure.

Democrats claim they want to end the war in Iraq and say their repeated attempts to force a troop pullout are aimed at achieving that goal, but a troop pullout won't end the war.  It will only increase the risk of giving back those hard won victories of the last several months.

Fortunately, the battle for Iraq has pretty much been won by an Iraqi-American alliance painstakingly built under the leadership of General David Petraeus.  The plan for sustaining that victory is laid out in the U.S. Army/Marines Counterinsurgency Field Manual.  Here is an excerpt from the section on Host-Nation Security Forces Logistics:

8-34. HN-produced materiel should be procured and used to support HN security forces whenever it can meet requirements and is reasonably and reliably available. This practice helps stimulate the HN economic base and promotes an attitude of self-sufficiency in HN forces. It reinforces the important political message that HN security forces are of the people, not agents of foreign powers. When promoting these practices, logisticians may find themselves outside the normal scope of their duties when they assess the suitability of locally available materials and advise how to make such materials suitable for self-sustainment. The most valuable lesson logisticians may give to HN security forces and those supporting them is not “what to do” but “how to think about the problem of sustainment” and its link to security effectiveness.

Building a Military: Sustainment Failure
By 1969, pressure was on for U.S. forces in Vietnam to turn the war over to the host nation in a process now known as Vietnamization. While assisting South Vietnamese military forces, the United States armed and equipped them with modern small arms, communications, and transportation equipment—all items produced by and sustained from the U.S. industrial base. This modern equipment required an equally sophisticated maintenance and supply system to sustain it. Sustaining this equipment challenged the South Vietnamese economically and culturally, despite the training of several thousand South Vietnamese in American supply and maintenance practices. In short, the American way of war was not indigenously sustainable and was incompatible with the Vietnamese material culture and economic capabilities. South Vietnam’s predominately agrarian-based economy could not sustain the high-technology equipment and computer-based systems established by U.S. forces and contractors. Consequently, the South Vietnamese military transformation was artificial and superficial. Many South Vietnamese involved in running the sustainment systems had little faith in them. Such attitudes encouraged poor administration and rampant corruption. After U.S. forces left and most U.S. support ended, the logistic shortcomings of the supposedly modern South Vietnamese military contributed to its rapid disintegration when the North Vietnamese advanced in 1975.

Lessons of Vietnam have been well learned.  Under the Petraeus strategy the Iraqi Army and Police are unlikely to disintegrate as did the South Vietnamese military in 1975.  Congressional Democrats may redouble their efforts to bring about the defeat Senator Reid famously declared has already occurred, but with each passing day the Iraqis move closer to sustainability.

Victory is unacceptable

The Washington Times describes a tenacious hold on denial by congressional Democrats.

Top Democrats yesterday rejected reports of U.S. military progress in Iraq, saying victory remains "out of reach" as long as political divisions roil Baghdad.

"It's not getting better; it's getting worse," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat. "The goal remains out of reach."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, said the reduced violence in Iraq wasn't enough to win her support for the mission.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq,

Iraqi officials plan to reduce checkpoints, ease curfews and reopen some roads in and around Baghdad because of improving security. Sunni Arab tribal leaders in western Anbar province, now allied with the U.S. military, say al Qaeda is "almost defeated" in their once-chaotic region.

You'd think the future of the Democratic party is at stake.

"Democrats can't acknowledge the fact that our troops are winning the war against al Qaeda in Iraq without admitting that they've been dead wrong on the biggest national challenge of our generation at the same time," said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican.

With so much riding on the outcome Democrats are steadfast in their resolve, unwilling to settle for victory without a fight.  The occasion for this round of defeatism is passage of their latest legislative effort to bolster al Qaeda's fading fortunes in Iraq.   House Democrats passed an emergency funding bill that links $50 billion to a complete pullout from Iraq by December.  President Bush will veto it since it encroaches on his authority as commander in chief.

In another age, the sense of a victory within reach would have united Americans.  In another age, Democrats thought liberty was worth fighting for.  They don't anymore.  Getting elected is what they fight for.  Nothing else matters.