Libertarian Leanings

The Casualty Con

Ralph Peters writes in the New York Post:

'It works. The media love the charge. Our troops and pilots are always guilty -- even if proven innocent. Because so many on the left want us to be guilty.

Few journalists bother to investigate...

[...]

This week, Taliban terrorists publicly beheaded three civilians in Afghanistan's Farah province, then herded women and children into compounds from which they fought government forces and US advisers.

With a vicious ground battle under way, the Talibs knew attack aircraft would appear. According to military sources, they set up the target. And, just in case, they slaughtered those women and children with grenades before any aircraft appeared. The entire massacre was a planned media event.

And who gets blamed? Not the Taliban. Before the smoke cleared, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was apologizing. (Apologizing is one thing this administration does with real enthusiasm.)'

Seeped in the Doctrine

One the more vacuous editorials I've read in quite some time recently appeared in our local paper, The Nashua Telegraph.  It was guest commentary, courtesy of The Keene Sentinel, and could only have been written by someone trapped in a liberal echo chamber.  We begin:

'The American news media, seeped in the doctrine of impartiality, don’t often use the word “torture.” We are more likely to read and hear about “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or “unconventional tactics” or “practices some people refer to as torture.”'

Seeped?  Let me give Keene Sentinel editorial writers the benefit of the doubt and suggest that they are victims of spell check imperfections.  Both words, "seeped" and "steeped," pass with flying colors.  However, while it is meaningless, or at best nonsensical, to say that the American news media are "seeped in the doctrine of impartiality," it is utter BS to suggest the media are "steeped" in any such doctrine.  And then to go on in support of that BS by saying that the media don't often use the word "torture" is absurd.  A Google search for the word "torture" under News yielded, 

'Results 1 – 10 of about 46,862 for torture. (0.35 seconds)'

As anybody who hasn't been living in a cave these last eight years is fully aware, our objective and impartial media are not at all reluctant to mention the word "torture".  Their only reluctance is to mention the word in connection with congressional Democrats.  Sentinel editorial writers bear this out, calling for investigations and possibly even prosecutions -- of Bush administration officials.

'The president and the Justice Department now say they will not prosecute the CIA agents who committed acts of torture. But what about the rest of the bunch? What about the low-level military personnel who have already served, or are serving, prison terms for the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib? Shouldn’t they be released? Weren’t they just following orders?

What about the Justice Department officials who wrote the legal opinions designed to authorize torture – people who are now comfortably ensconced in universities, think tanks and, in one case, the federal appellate bench? Obama has been ambiguous about what their fate should be.

And what of the very top officials of the Bush administration, who are now traveling about, heads held high, giving speeches, acting as pundits on TV and writing books?

In a newspaper interview, U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., says he doesn’t see how we can just turn away from all this:

“I understand that the president believes that the people who actually administered these tactics should be immune. I’m not sure about that. I understand that they have a greater argument than those who created the policies.

“But those who created these legal theories, knowing full well that there was not a reasonable argument, I’m not so sure they shouldn’t be accountable. I don’t see how we as a country say, ‘Oh, fine, we knew this was against international law, we knew it was against our own laws,’ and these people can come up with any phony legal opinion they want. I’ve read these opinions because I’m on the intelligence committee and had access to them much earlier than the public. These arguments are bogus.”

Feingold makes an excellent point. Won’t the pre-emptive vindication of this bunch set a precedent for future leaders who might also be tempted to ignore the law?'

So absorbed in their own moral preening, editorial writers overlooked the distinction between the criminal acts committed at Abu Ghraib, for which military personnel were court martialled, and Bush administration wrestling with the legal and moral issues in their efforts to prevent another attack on America. An attack that virtually everyone believed was imminent.  

The editorialists also failed to mention the complicity of congressional Democrats.  Some of those same congressional Democrats who now call for investigations and prosecutions were among those briefed on enhanced interrogation methods. 

'After three days of screaming headlines about the CIA destroying videotapes in 2005 of the "harsh" interrogation of two terrorists, it now comes to light that in 2002 key members of Congress were fully briefed by the CIA about those interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. One member of that Congressional delegation was the future House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

The Washington Post on Sunday reported these series of briefings. While it is not our habit to promote the competition, readers should visit the Post's Web site and absorb this astonishing detail for themselves as reported by Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen in "Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002: In meetings, spy panels' chiefs did not protest, officials say."

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.

Why would the CIA want to tell the most senior members of Congress about anything so sensitive? No doubt in part because senior officials at the CIA, not to mention the interrogators themselves, assuredly did not want to begin any such policy absent closing the political and legal loop on it.

The Congressional briefings touched the political base, and a Justice Department memo at that time deemed the interrogation methods legal. Most crucially, bear in mind that when pressed about all this at his confirmation hearings, Attorney General Michael Mukasey pointedly said he would not make a post-facto condemnation of the techniques, thereby putting the "freedom" of the interrogators at risk, "simply because I want to be congenial."'

But now we have to put up with the false outrage of partisan journalists over interrogations techniques that are part of the survival training for our military, interrogations that we know saved American lives.  This is not a new story.  The interrogation story has been around for seven years, the partisan journalists much longer than that.  Concerning those congressional Democrats Porter Goss recently wrote in the Washington Post:

'A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation's intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA's "High Value Terrorist Program," including the development of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.

Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

-- The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.

-- We understood what the CIA was doing.

-- We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.

-- We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.

-- On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.'

Charles Krauthammer calls those congressional Democrats contemptible.  

Today Pelosi protests "we were not -- I repeat -- were not told that waterboarding or any other of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used." She imagines that this distinction between past and present, Clintonian in its parsing, is exonerating.

On the contrary. It is self-indicting. If you are told about torture that has already occurred, you might justify silence on the grounds that what's done is done and you are simply being used in a post-facto exercise to cover the CIA's rear end. The time to protest torture, if you really are as outraged as you now pretend to be, is when the CIA tells you what it is planning to do "in the future."

But Pelosi did nothing. No protest. No move to cut off funding. No letter to the president or the CIA chief or anyone else saying "Don't do it."

On the contrary, notes Porter Goss, then chairman of the House intelligence committee: The members briefed on these techniques did not just refrain from objecting, "on a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda."

More support, mind you. Which makes the current spectacle of self-righteous condemnation not just cowardly but hollow. It is one thing to have disagreed at the time and said so. It is utterly contemptible, however, to have been silent then and to rise now "on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009" (the words are Blair's) to excoriate those who kept us safe these harrowing last eight years.'

The journalists who wrap themselves in a mantle of morality as they revel in this partisan witch hunt are just as contemptible.

Newsweek Flash: We're Winning the War on Terror!

Let's say I was shocked to hear that news flash from Newsweek editor, Jon Meacham.  Mr. Meacham appeared on The O'Reilly Factor last night in a discussion of the pros and cons of 9/11-like commission to delve into the Bush administration's support for aggressive interrogation tactics against captured terrorists.  Predictably enough, Mr. Meacham believes an independent commission would be a good thing.  His Newsweek column of April 25th lays out his reasoning which he reiterated on The Factor last night.   

'The idea that our only options are to move on completely or to prosecute is a classic false choice. A third way would be a 9/11-style bipartisan commission that would include clear supporters of the Bush administration. Such a panel would meet largely in private, have the power to grant immunity to witnesses and be charged with answering, as clearly as possible, the central question of whether Bush's war on terror in its entirety saved lives. Michael Isikoff touches on these matters in this week's issue, writing about FBI agentAli Soufan, who got intel from key terror suspects—without using torture.

Still, it seems likely that the interrogations, among other things, including surveillance, helped us prevent further terrorist attacks. We may never know for sure—you cannot prove a negative—but the public interest would be served by knowing more rather than less about how the war on terror has unfolded.'

Mr. Meacham has a much higher opinion of the 9/11 Commission than I do.  The 9/11 Commission was a dog and pony show in which commissioners tried their very hardest to shield the Clinton administration from any blame for ignoring terrorist threats.  It was stacked with people who promoted the theory that the World Trade Center attacks should have been anticipated, not by the Clinton administration which had been in charge of our national defense for the previous eight years, but by the Bush administration which had been in power for eight months.

Highlights from the 9/11 Commission drama included Clinton administration holdover, Richard C. Clarke, apologizing the government's failure -- taking the blame on behalf of the Bush administration.  What a guy.  Then there was the spectacle of commissioner and former Clinton administration Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick (Why was she a commissioner and not a witness?) pressing Bush administration Attorney General John Ashcroft on why nobody "connected the dots,"  only to have Ashcroft produce the memo that she wrote during her Clinton administration tenure that forbade information sharing between law enforcement and intelligence arms of the federal government. 

Let's not forget Clinton administration National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who was caught stuffing classified documents from the National Archive into his pants.  He admitted later as part of a plea bargain that he smuggled them out, hid them under a trailer, and later destroyed them. 

But I digress.  The startling news from the Mr. Meacham during his O'Reilly Factor appearance was that we are winning the war on terror.  He said it a couple of times.  NewsBusters has the transcript.  Emphasis in it is mine.

'O'REILLY: Look, I liked your book and I think you did a fair assessment of Jackson and you deserve the prize, in my opinion. But this pinhead stuff that you guys are peddling at Newsweek is ridiculous. Now, let me tell you why. Because, as you said, every president in a time of leadership, particularly in a time of war, and Jackson fought two of them, the Indian War and the War of 1812. There are going to be mistakes made. And you say that Jackson's good over-rode the bad. Well, I don't think we've been attacked since 9/11, you know? I don't think any other Americans are dead. So I don't want any show trial that is going to inevitably embarrass this country and inevitably make people who defended us, make their lives harder. And I'm right and you're wrong. Go ahead.

MEACHAM: Did the -- did the 9/11 Commission embarrass the country?

O'REILLY: Did it do anything? Did the -- did the Iraq commission do -- you know what the Iraq commission came back with?

MEACHAM: No, that's not what I asked you. Did the 9/11-

O'REILLY: No, that was just the same thing as you're calling for. The Iraq commission came back and said 'surrender,' okay? And Bush and Petraeus said 'no, we're not going to do that' and they turned it around. It doesn't do us any good now, Jon. Go ahead.

MEACHAM: That's ahistorical, though, Bill, and I know you don't believe in being ahistorical. What I want to know -- and we were calling it a 9/12 Commission -- I want to look at the whole war on terror. We're winning the war on terror because, as you say, we haven't been hit. How did that happen? What should we be doing going forward to emulate? Was it the attacks -- the unmanned drones? Is it the surveillance? Is it rendition?

O'REILLY: Well, how do you do that?

MEACHAM: Well, I think you do it the way you did the 9/12 -- the 9/11 Commission. And you get people, you immunize them. You don't do it in public, I don't think you have a show trial.

O'REILLY: But it leaks out and you know it will.

MEACHAM: But 9/11 Didn't.

O'REILLY: Yeah it did. There was a whole bunch stuff that came to me and I used some of it?

MEACHAM: No, but we learned -- we learned from that report. Why are you against wanting to know what worked?

O'REILLY: Because it's too soon, that's why. We're in the middle of this thing now. It's too soon. It's politicized. You know it's politicized. You -- if you don't -- look, come on.

MEACHAM: We did Pearl Harbor-

O'REILLY: What did you think of that cartoon with the Statue of Liberty with the whip? Did you like that? Was that good?

MEACHAM: I'm not going to comment on somebody else's editorial decision.

O'REILLY: Why not? Why not?

MEACHAM: I'm just not going to comment on that.

O'REILLY: Why?

MEACHAM: Because they make-

O'REILLY: You're an American. Forget you're editor of Newsweek, you're an American. You see this thing, what do you think? You think this is fair?

MEACHAM: You don't often see those two things together.

O'REILLY: Yeah, do you think this is fair? Do you think that's good for the country? Are you looking forward to putting those pictures coming out next week in Newsweek magazine, of abusing the prisoners, you looking forward to doing that?

MEACHAM: What I'm looking forward to is trying to get, what I think would be, a useful commission to look at how we're winning, winning, the war on terror. And I don't think that's-

O'REILLY: I don't think it's possible. I don't think it's possible in this day and age, as polarized as this country is, to do something like that. If I thought it were possible I would be on your train but it isn't. And it's too soon. You know, I'm not, see I'm -- look, you're a Pulitzer Prize winner now, you're the editor of a big magazine, you know? And you won't comment on that -- on that Statue of Liberty with a whip? Come on, you're an American, too. You know, I'm fighting the battle here alone. It's me and the Wall Street Journal, and couple of other guys on Fox, against a juggernaut of media apathy that you're a part of at Newsweek magazine, with all due respect.

MEACHAM: Well I -- obviously I disagree with that.

O'REILLY: What, you're a not a left-wing magazine?

MEACHAM: We -- we've had this conversation.

O'REILLY: And, yeah?

MEACHAM: No, I don't -- We're not a partisan magazine. We're just not.

O'REILLY: Come on.'

It's as if Mr. Meacham is acting in a play.  He's in the role of the "objective journalist."  Unfortunately, his role doesn't fit the story line.  A real journalist, one who was truly objective, would have been on the story long before this.  A real journalist, one who was truly objective, would already have done some digging on his own. 

Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, though, was caught completely by surprise.  He may have been a crack reporter in his day, rising to the position of editor as he did, but sadly it's no longer his day.  The baffled Mr. Meacham looks to a commission to explain the mysteries for him. 

It must be an odd style of investigative reporting that they do at Newsweek.  Step One: See what you can find in the pages of the Washington Post.  If you really have to pull out all the stops, look at the New York Times.  If it's not there it didn't happen.  Move on.

But then a strange thing happened.  Newsweek editor Jon Meacham looked around an realized, the U.S. hasn't been attacked by terrorists since September 11, 2001.  Why, what a stunning discovery -- a mystery to be solved.  I don't suppose he would figure out that the Bush administration strategy of fighting the terrorists in their backyard, instead waiting for them to come to ours, might have had something to do with that.

As Bill O'Reilly pointed out, it's much to soon to install a commission.  The commission of today's popular fantasies would have the sole purpose of indicting Bush administration officials for speaking harshly to people whose only offense was that they were trying desperately to kill Americans.  Actually, they had already succeeded once.  In spite of that, it will be several years before the Meachams of the world will have the honesty and moral courage to admit that our troops fought terrorists in Iraq and whipped them badly.  That's why the terrorists didn't come here, and that's why we're winning the war on terror.  You might think a journalist of Jon Meacham's stature would have figured that out by now.  But no.  He needs a commission.

Safe and Sunny April 2009?

Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard speculates on the implications one might draw from the White House release of the Bush administration "torture memos" .

'It wasn't really a surprise that President Obama sided with leftist lawyers in his Justice Department and released, over the objections of the intelligence community, four Office of Legal Counsel memos that concluded certain interrogation techniques used in the last several years by CIA officers on certain al Qaeda terrorists were legal. Nor was it a surprise that the presidential statement put out by the White House was a medley of preening self-righteousness and defensive disingenuousness.

What was more interesting was the accompanying statement by the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, trying to justify Obama's decision--or at least put it "into perspective." The perspective, the context, is that in the months after 9/11, "we did not have a clear understanding of the enemy we were dealing with, and our every effort was focused on preventing further attacks that would kill more Americans. It was during these months that the CIA was struggling to obtain critical information from captured al Qaida leaders, and requested permission to use harsher interrogation methods. The OLC memos make clear that senior legal officials judged the harsher methods to be legal."

Blair continues: "Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing. As the President has made clear, and as both CIA Director Panetta and I have stated, we will not use those techniques in the future. But we will absolutely defend those who relied on these memos and those guidelines."

So: We were once in danger. Now we live in "a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009." Now, in April 2009, Obama's Director of National Intelligence seems to be saying, we're safe. Good news, if true. And it would be an amazing tribute to the preceding administration's efforts in the war on terror--efforts that Democrats have been saying for years were making us less safe. Apparently, the old policies worked. The threat from al Qaeda has gone.'

The release of those memos provides a good indicator for gauging whether the Obama administration will ever succeed in gathering intelligence on potential terrorist attacks against the U.S.  I think we can expect his administration will be just as successful there as Obama himself was when he asked for cooperation from our European allies.  Zero.  Besides, according to his Department of Homeland Security the real threat is posed by veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, not al Qaeda.

It's interesting to note that certain Democrats who have been outspoken in their condemnation of the Bush administration, at one time approved of what they would later call "torture".  Here is a Washington Post article from December 2007.

'In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

[...]

Individual lawmakers' recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."'

That may be one reason neither the Obama administration nor the Spanish courts will pursue any charges against Bush administration officials.  It could be embarrassing for certain high ranking Democrats.  There is another one, according to William A. Jacobson, Associate Clinical Professor of Law, Cornell Law School. No law was broken.  It's all about he moral preening.

The Democrats by their actions admit that Bush administration policies really did protect the U.S. made us safer than we otherwise would have been.  Now that the Democrats are firmly in power the plan is to continue those policies.

War or Law Enforcement

In an interview with CNN former Vice President Dick Cheney said that the Obama administration has made the country more vulnerable to a terrorist attack by changing America's approach to fighting terrorism.  The Obama administration prefers law enforcement over a wartime approach.

'Citing "enhanced interrogation" techniques, government wiretapping and other Bush initiatives as instrumental in preventing terrorist attacks, Mr. Cheney said that rolling back those programs will undermine U.S. intelligence gathering.

"I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9/11," he said in an interview on CNN's "State of the Union."

"President Obama campaigned against it all across the country. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack," Mr. Cheney said.

Mr. Cheney said the plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is one of the Obama decisions that reflect a "law enforcement" as opposed to a "wartime" view of terrorism.

"We made a decision after 9/11 that I think was crucial. We said, 'This is a war - it's not a law enforcement problem,' " Mr. Cheney said. "Once you go into a wartime situation and it's a strategic threat, then you use all of your assets to go after the enemy ... you use your intelligence resources, your military resources, your financial resources, everything you can in order to shut down that terrorist threat against you.

"When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which is what I sense they're doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth, they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that's required, and that concept of military threat that's essential if you're going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks," he said.

The White House had no immediate comment on Mr. Cheney's evaluation of President Obama's decisions.'  

'But Mr. Obama has said that moves such as closing the detention facility at the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay will enhance U.S. security by strengthening the U.S. image abroad. He also has said that the Bush-era practice of holding suspected terrorists as enemy combatants has been a failure because none of them has been successfully prosecuted.'

When past presidents have spoken of the need to project an aura of American strength, they never meant that we should project a strengthened touchy, feely image. 

While Obama signals his intent to back away from a wartime strategy, India has begun to move in the opposite direction.  According to the Asia Times,  India has begun to reassess its military capabilities with an eye toward "non-state actors".

'According to a senior defense official, the army has traditionally been manpower intensive, which is an anachronism. "It needs to shed manpower and replace it with high-end technologies. This hasn't happened due to inadequate resource allotment," said the official.

In his report "Indian Army: 2020" - a blueprint for the army of the future - General S Padmanabhan wrote that it is threats from non-state groups armed with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that India needs to watch out for. "These elements could be acting on their own initiative or, at the behest of a sponsor nation," he said. "This dimension of WMD would warrant a war-like response from us."'

Sounds remarkably like the discussion leading up to the invasion of Iraq.  The WMD dimension "would warrant a war-like response."  For state sponsors the beauty of terrorism lies in the plausible deniability that it affords.  Sponsors may assume a pose of innocence while their proxies go on the attack.  For a brief moment the invasion of Iraq took that away.  Iraq and other state sponsors were challenged to demonstrate that they did not support or harbor terrorists, or seek weapons of mass destruction.  Libya renounced its nuclear weapons program, Syria pulled out of Lebanon.  They were persuaded by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

But that was then and this is now, and with Congress safely in anti-war Democrat hands, sponsors of terrorism have much less to fear.  Obama and his friends in congress extend the offer to give them back their cover.  Instead holding state sponsors accountable by threat of military action, the Democrat regime signals its intent to go after the pawns who plan the attacks and try to prosecute them in court.  The War on Terror is done.  Now it's Law and Order, with a heavy dose of wishful thinking.

Preserving liberal psyches

Liberal psyches be preserved!  It seems that elements of the mainstream press have embarked on extensive retrospective analyses that seek to trace all anti-American sentiment back to origins in Bush administration policy.  A recent Pentagon report on the Guantanamo Bay military prison was ordered by President Barack Obama.  In spite of its conclusion that detainee treatment meets the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, a remarkable front page story in the Washington Post tries to make the case that Guantanamo is turning otherwise likable young men into jihadists as a result of their detainment. 

'Since his death, U.S. intelligence agencies have sought to determine when Ajmi became a hard-core jihadist. Was it in the late 1990s, when he came under the sway of a radical preacher while serving in the Kuwaiti army? Was it in 2001, when he allegedly joined the Taliban? Was it upon his release in 2005, when extremists back home celebrated him as the "Lion of Guantanamo"?

Or is the answer potentially more alarming: Was his descent into unrepentant radicalism an unintended consequence of his incarceration?'

In March 2008 Ajmi drove a pickup truck packed with explosives onto an Iraqi army base outside Mosul killing 13 Iraqi soldiers and wounding 42 others.  U.S. military officials at Guantanamo had Ajmi pegged as a trouble maker at best, but according to the Post, his lawyerThomas Wilner says the problem was Guantanamo.

'Wilner tried to talk to Ajmi about his upcoming administrative review board hearing -- the Guantanamo equivalent of a parole board meeting -- saying it would give him an opportunity to tell the truth about what he was doing before his capture. But Ajmi wasn't interested. He wanted to talk about how he was being treated at Guantanamo, about the IRFing, about how the guards rifled through his papers.

Wilner urged him to focus on legal issues. If he wanted Shearman to keep representing him, he needed to sign a form to that effect. If he did not sign, Wilner said, he would not be able to see him anymore.

Ajmi tried to change the subject again. Wilner's interpreter, a young Egyptian American man, interjected. "This guy is just trying to help you," he said. "Can't you address him?"

Ajmi glowered. He bared his teeth. Then he threw a cup of hot tea in the interpreter's face.

Wilner ended the session, but he soon forgave Ajmi. The detainee's hostility, he believed, was a result of mental deterioration caused by his confinement at Guantanamo.'

The forces that drive suicide bombers to their explosive ends stand revealed.  How fortunate that we have a savior in President Barack Obama who will end the scourge by closing Guantanamo.  Suicide bombing will be soon be a distant memory.  Well maybe not, but at the very least liberal consciences will be salved in the conviction that future bloody deaths from human bombs are not their fault. 

But this is just one of many stories intended to place blame where the press would like it to be.  Unfortunately for the Washington press, their ongoing campaign to discredit the Bush administration is running into obstacles.  For one thing, it's becoming clearer by the day, that what the press considers the worst foreign policy disaster in recent American history, the invasion of Iraq, has planted the seeds of democracy and they have taken root.  The recent Iraqi election has resulted a resounding victory for secular government, a rejection of Islamic religious rule, and a rejection of control by Iranian sponsored parties.  The establishment of a democratic government in Iraq represents a shift in the balance of power in the Middle East, and it' has shifted dramatically in favor of the U.S.  

This is not good news for Washington Post reporter extraordinaire, Thomas Ricks, who has a new book.  According to Mario Loyola his new one is as wildly off the mark as his last one.  (Disclosure:  Aside from the excerpts of "Fiasco" that appeared in the Post, I haven't read either and it's not likely I will.)  In Loyola's analysis Ricks' new book "The Gamble" promotes the conventional media wisdom on the War in Iraq.  You know the drill.  Democracy in Iraq is doomed to fail and would already have done so but for the dumb luck of the surge, and even that was a political failure.

'Following the Woodward method, Ricks interviewed enough people that he can quote somebody saying pretty much whatever he wants said in support of his narrative, and he puts those who gave him the greatest access in the most favorable light. Ricks had surprising access to a lot of senior people. Gen. Jack Keane, one of the signal proponents of the surge, reports being surprised at how much information Ricks already had by the time of their interview.

But in the absence of archival research, this mountain of quotations fails to communicate so many critical aspects of what happened — and of how decisions were made — that it would risk incoherence if it had to stand on its own as history. Ricks solves that problem by weaving his reportage around the most familiar propositions of the conventional media narrative: 1) Rumsfeld and his senior generals stubbornly refused to implement a proper counterinsurgency strategy and nearly caused a disaster; 2) the surge has succeeded militarily but failed politically; 3) democracy is a pipe dream in Iraq, where “lots of little Saddams” have replaced the one we toppled; 4) the Iraq war has been most of all a victory for Iran; and 5) Obama will be fighting the Iraq war long into the future, with an uncertain outcome. Each of these propositions is seriously flawed if not completely wrong.'

But there is a method to the madness in all this.  The sad fact is that the media and many of liberal intelligentsia really wanted America to lose the war in Iraq.  It wasn't so much the war that was objectionable as the pain of having to acknowledge that George W. Bush might have been right about it.  Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown wondered aloud on February 1, 2005, shortly after the Iraqis first went to the polls, "What if Bush has been right about Iraq all along?"  Brown wrote:

'But after watching Sunday's election in Iraq and seeing the first clear sign that freedom really may mean something to the Iraqi people, you have to be asking yourself: What if it turns out Bush was right, and we were wrong?

It's hard to swallow, isn't it?

Americans cross own barrier

If you fit the previously stated profile, I know you're fighting the idea, because I am, too. And if you were with the president from the start, I've already got your blood boiling.

For those who've been in the same boat with me, we don't need to concede the point just yet. There's a long way to go. But I think we have to face the possibility.

I won't say that it had never occurred to me previously, but it's never gone through my mind as strongly as when I watched the television coverage from Iraq that showed long lines of people risking their lives by turning out to vote, honest looks of joy on so many of their faces.

Some CNN guest expert was opining Monday that the Iraqi people crossed a psychological barrier by voting and getting a taste of free choice (setting aside the argument that they only did so under orders from their religious leaders).

I think it's possible that some of the American people will have crossed a psychological barrier as well.

Deciding democracy's worth

On the other side of that barrier is a concept some of us have had a hard time swallowing:

Maybe the United States really can establish a peaceable democratic government in Iraq, and if so, that would be worth something.

Would it be worth all the money we've spent? Certainly.

Would it be worth all the lives that have been lost? That's the more difficult question, and while I reserve judgment on that score until such a day arrives, it seems probable that history would answer yes to that as well.

I don't want to get carried away in the moment.

Going to war still sent so many terrible messages to the world.'

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart had similar misgivings.

'Jon Stewart, late in the Daily Show last night to Newsweek pundit Fareed Zakaria: "I’ve watched this thing unfold from the start and here’s the great fear that I have: What if Bush, the president, ours, has been right about this all along? I feel like my world view will not sustain itself and I may, and again I don’t know if I can physically do this, implode.'

Here we are four years down the road with another Iraqi election in the books, but no implosions on the left, no facing of possibilities, no worrying over whether or not Bush was right.  Instead we have denial.  Yes, the surge that was doomed to failure, but it "succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated."  Obama's words.  And that's the ticket.  Nobody with a brain could possibly have figured the surge would actually work.  What else could it be but luck?

So as long as things go well in Iraq, we can expect the Rickses of the world to remain locked into a cycle of "investigative" journalism and "non-fiction" literature that will explain to their self satisfaction how luck saved the situation in Iraq, after George W. Bush made such a mess of it.  They will endlessly explain how anything that worked was less a result of administration purpose and planning than it was of pure chance.  Or if it can't be written off to chance pundits will opine that the flowering of democracy in Iraq is really not such a good thing anyway.

Of course, it's not clear that President Obama will help them out of their liberal quandry.  Sure he was as big a critic as the best of them, but the buck stops on his desk now, and talk is cheap.  Easy to say invading Iraq was a mistake, but now that security has improved and Iraqis are deciding issues with ballots rather than bullets, can the liberals keep saying it's a huge mistake and do it with a straight face.  Will Obama really want to risk having a democratically governed allied country disappear on his watch by pulling up stakes and leaving as he promised early on in his campaigns.  As with other campaign promises, this one may also have passed its expiration date.

'WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama faces split opinions within the military on whether to make the speedy withdrawal from Iraq he championed as a candidate.

Obama's top generals in Baghdad are pressing for an elongated timetable. Some influential senior advisers inside the Pentagon are more amenable to a quicker pullout.

Obama has yet to decide the matter. But his recent announcement that he is sending thousands more combat troops to Afghanistan implies a drawdown of at least two brigades from Iraq by summer.

That does not answer the question whether Obama will stick to his stated goal of a 16-month pullout or opt for a slower, less risky approach.

Gen. Ray Odierno, the top American commander in Baghdad, favors a longer timetable for leaving Iraq. He sees 2009 as a pivotal year, with parliamentary elections set to be held in December; he doesn't want to lose more than two of the 14 combat brigades that are now in Iraq before the end of the year. And he believes the U.S. military will need to remain engaged in Iraq, to some degree, for years to come.

Odierno's boss at U.S. Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus, leans toward Odierno's view.'

Meanwhile, back on the liberal ranch, the Ajmi saga continues in Post pages this morning.  Just in case anybody missed the story on Sunday.

'When Thomas Wilner learned that his client had become a suicide bomber, he said he felt physically ill. He thought of the victims, and he thought of Ajmi. "Here was this poor, dumb kid -- I really don't think he was a bad kid -- who was thrown into a hellhole of a prison and who went mad," he said. "Should we really be surprised that somebody we treated this way would become radicalized, would become crazy?"'

A Kuwaiti national was captured with al Qaeda in Pakistan after fighting in Afghanistan against the Northern Alliance.  And the Washington Post thinks it's Guantanamo that turned him to jihad.  It's sounds like a typical liberal mea culpa.  "Yes, America is to blame, particularly the America that isn't me."  There.  Doesn't that feel better?  It's George W. Bush, who's really to blame.  That will be the media theme for the next four years, anyway.  It's something liberals can swallow.

Best Seller

According to Power Line the recently released paperback edition of Douglas Feith's War and Decision advertises itself as a Washington Post and New York Times best seller. This in spite of the fact that both papers refused to review the book when the hard cover edition was first published.

'The MSM's decision to ignore War and Decision was understandable. Through the painstaking use of documentary evidence, Feith destroys much of the false narrative the MSM labored so hard to assign to the Iraq war and the decisions surrounding it. The MSM apparently had no substantive response. In fact, Doug said today that, to his knowledge, no one has identified a single factual inaccuracy in the book. Under these circumstances, from the standpoint of the liberal MSM, the best approach was simply to ignore the book. Meanwhile, lefty bloggers limited themselves, as usual, to invective.'

The Great Foreign Policy Blunder

In early 2007 George W. Bush confounded his critics when he announced a change in the conduct of the Iraq War.  He said that he would commit 20,000 more troops to the fight and that they would employ a new counterinsurgency strategy that made protecting the Iraqi population the highest priority.  This, he said, was intended to "create space" that would allow political progress to move forward.  Hopeful Democrats and their supporters in the mainstream press had been urging surrender. 

2006 was a bad year in Iraq.  An eruption of sectarian violence raised monthly death tolls to their highest since fighting began in 2003.  By the end of 2005 the insurgents had recognized that they had no hope of defeating U.S. forces militarily.  In 2006 insurgent stategy had shifted comletely -- away from confronting the Americans, to attacking Iraqi civilians instead.  The insurgents went about demonstrating their ability to randomly inflict murder upon large numbers of Iraqi citizens. 

This was described in the press and in Democratic political speeches as evidence of the coming U.S. defeat in the Iraq war.  It was to be the signature failure of the Bush administration, although it would be a neat trick for the insurgents to win the war without winning any military battles.  It meant they would have to win the war on the information front by convincing the American people that victory against them was impossible. 

Murder was the insurgency's only vehicle for doing this -- the bloodier the better.  As the U.S. set out to protect Iraqi civilians, the insurgents set out to prove it couldn't be done.  In this the insurgent's natural ally was the media.  "If it bleeds it leads," so goes the saying, and the worldwide press celebrated the spectacular misery visited on the Iraqis. 

Democrats were aghast that President Bush failed to heed the opinion polls and instead set the surge in motion.  Call it an accident if you wish, but Democrats had lined themselves up with the insurgency.  As the insurgency endeavored to prove the impossibility of defeating them Iraq, the Democratic obliged by agreeing with them publicly and constantly. 

2006 was a bad year for Republicans seeking re-election.  While Democrats campaigned against the war Republicans tried to change the subject.  Instead of standing with their President, Republicans stood by and watched the Democrats take control of both the Senate and the House.  They felt they would hurt their chances if they appeared to be connected to George W. Bush and the war in Iraq.

The newly minted Senate Majority Leader and Democrat Harry Reid famously declared that the war was already lost.  Time and again Democratic leaders in congress moved to cut off funding for the "failed" war, but each time they failed to win enough votes to do it.  Unfortunately, by the time George W. Bush announced his intention to build up troop levels, 70% of Americans opposed the move believing Democratic and media pronouncements that it wouldn't do any good. 

It did, though.  When the additional troops finally reached Baghdad and the surrounding area, violence took a dramatic plunge.  It took time, but eventually Democrats were forced to admit that the surge worked after all.  Even Barack Obama, late in his presidential campaign, was forced to admit, "the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated."  Nobody?  Really?

After a while, even media luminaries who had opposed the war and opposed the surge had to admit it worked.  Recently Peter Beinart writing in the Washington Post said it's no longer even a close call.  The surge worked. 

The fallback position is:  So what?  The new reality now being force fed to the news consuming public is,

'...even if the calm endures, that still doesn't justify the Bush administration's initial decision to go to war, which remains one of the great blunders in American foreign policy history.'

In Beinart's mind and in the minds of Democrats in congress it's a given.  They casually throw it out there at every opportunity, confident that American support for the war has been decimated by the relentlessly negative reporting by the media and rhetoric of their Democratic clients.  But it's a claim that gets its support almost solely on the media, which is virulently anti-war and anti-Bush, and on opinion polls which are media driven.  What happens when this, too, turns out to be just another premature assessment? 

In is recent interview with Jim Lehrer, Vice President Richard Cheney put things into perspective.  It's what Beinart considers a blunder.

'MR. LEHRER: Mr. Vice President, getting from there to here, 4500 Americans have died, at least a hundred thousand Iraqis have died. Has it been worth that?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I think so.

MR. LEHRER: Why?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Because I believed at the time that what Saddam Hussein represented was, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, was a terror-sponsoring state - so designated by the State Department. He was making payments to the families of suicide bombers; he provided a safe haven and sanctuary for Abu Nidal and other terrorist operations. He had produced and used weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological agents.

He'd had a nuclear program in the past. He killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and he did have a relationship with al-Qaida. Now, we've had this debate, keeps people trying to conflate those arguments.

That's not to say that Saddam was responsible for 9/11; it is to say - as George Tenet, CIA director testified in open session in the Senate - that there was a relationship there that went back 10 years.

So this was a terror-sponsoring state with access to weapons of mass destruction and that's the greatest threat we faced in the aftermath of 9/11: The next time we found terrorists in the middle of one of our cities, it wouldn't be 19 guys armed with airline tickets and box cutters, it would be terrorists armed with a biological agent or maybe even a nuclear device.

So I think, given the track record of Saddam Hussein, I think we did exactly the right thing, I think the country's better off for it today, I think it's been part of the effort alongside Afghanistan to liberate 50 million people and establish a vibrant democracy in the heart of the Middle East. I think those are major, major accomplishments.'

And this:

'MR. LEHRER: One more general scope here, Mr. Vice President. What do you make of a current suggestion that you have been in fact the most powerful vice president in history, but in one of the most failed presidencies in history?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I don't buy that.

MR. LEHRER: You don't buy that?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: No, I think the argument that this is a failed presidency is just dead wrong. I think we'll hear that from some of our critics, but when I look back at what we've been able to do - we dealt with big issues.

We didn't deal with school uniforms, we dealt with the fact that we brought down two of the worst regimes in the 20^th century: the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. We were forced when we arrived - shortly after we arrived - to have to deal with the global war on terror, which had not been managed properly before that.

We ended up inheriting a situation that has been very challenging, but we've been very successful at it. And when you look at what we've been able to do, both in terms of our activities overseas as well as our operations that allowed us to block any further attack against the United States here at home, I think those are great successes and I think there aren't many administrations that can point to successes on that scale.'

If Democrats were aghast at Bush's refusal to quit and accept defeat, they and their media cronies were enraged as his determination has led to the victory that can now be declared in Iraq with the passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1859.  Omar Fadhil of Iraq the Model celebrated its passage.

'Iraq has started to reap the benefits of the status of forces agreement with the United States. The United Nations Security Council voted to set the ground for relieving Iraq from the restrictions of Chapter Seven of the UN Charter.

In fact, the remaining effects of previous resolutions will from now on serve only to protect Iraq’s assets from claims by other parties, not to impose anything on the people of Iraq. Sovereignty, which was lost two decades ago under Saddam Hussein’s capricious and belligerent reign, is being restored to the nation.

The Security Council resolution 1859 states, among other things, that Iraq is no longer a threat to its neighbors, region, or the world. The United States has succeeded in transforming a bellicose, autocratic state into a friendly one that is making steady progress towards becoming a self-sustaining democracy — the international community is finally coming to recognize this transformation.
This resolution is bound to make a positive impact on the domestic and regional levels. First and foremost it is a testimony to the United States’ true desire to help Iraq get on its feet and relieve it from restrictions that belong to a past era — the United States is indisputably a friendly protector of Iraq, not an occupier as many like to claim.

However, this achievement did not receive as much attention in the Arab media as did the shoes of a disturbed young journalist...'

It's an achievement that received no attention in any media, not just Arab media.  Was anyone even aware of Resolution 1859?  A Google search came up with only three news items about it.  Here is the screen shot, as of January 23rd.

It's hard for me to think of our Democratic leadership and our journalistic elites as anything but treasonous, after having done everything in their power to hand victory to a terrorist insurgency over our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, .  They gave air time and credibility to the insurgents' message, they fought their legislative battles hoping to end the American struggle to beat them, and they waged a relentless public relations campaign against anything and everything the Bush administration hoped to achieve.  But still, they failed.  Now they say that they would like to prosecute George Bush.  For what?  Winning a war they said couldn't be won? 

By claiming that Iraq was a foreign policy blunder Democrats absolve themselves of their faithlessness.  Over the next four years liberal pundits, especially the ones masquerading as journalists, will cling to the fiction that deposing Saddam Hussein was a foreign policy blunder.  Fighting the War on Terror was a foreign policy blunder.  Winning the war in Iraq was a foreign policy blunder.  Conversion of two enemy countries to allied countries was a foreign policy blunder.  The spread of democracy in the Middle East was a foreign policy blunder.

The question now, is what happens when it becomes apparent that this "foreign policy blunder" has laid the groundwork for lasting peace to the Middle East?  Will our Democratic leadership sabotage the peace in order to correct the foriegn policy blunder?  If an election hangs in the balance I think we can count on it.  Maybe then the Republicans will finally find the stomache to fight them on it.

We must all stand together

Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, urged to India to resist striking back at Pakistan for the terror attacks in Mumbai. 

Speaking exclusively to the Financial Times, Pakistan’s president warned that provocation by rogue “non-state actors” posed the danger of a return to war between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

“Even if the militants are linked to Lashkar-i-tayyaba, [a prominent militant group linked to previous attacks against India] who do you think we are fighting?” asked Mr Zardari, whose country is battling al-Qaeda and Taliban militants on its shared border with Afghanistan.

“We live in troubled times where non-state actors have taken us to war before, whether it is the case of those who perpetrated [the] 9/11 [attacks on the US] or contributed to the escalation of the situation in Iraq,” said Mr Zardari.

“Now, events in Mumbai tell us that there are ongoing efforts to carry out copycat attacks by militants. We must all stand together to fight out this menace.”

Taheri predicts passage

Amir Taheri predicts that the Status of Forces Agreement between Iraq and the U.S. will pass the Iraqi Parliament with more than a two-thirds majority.

With the SOFA so obviously popular in Iraq, Tehran has softened its opposition to it these last few days. Most Iraqi observers now expect SOFA to pass with more than a two-thirds majority.

The agreement opens the door for officially ending Iraq's dispute with the United Nations, which started with Saddam Hussein's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Iraq would be released from UN sanctions, regaining its full sovereignty.

It also gives Iraq three years during which it will hold two crucial sets of elections. Local government elections, to be held on Jan. 31, will allow a new post-Saddam generation of leaders to secure a popular mandate. Parliamentary elections, to be held in 2010, should foster the emergence of proper parties competing through political programs rather than sectarian lists of candidates.

Beginning in January, SOFA gives Iraq three years in which to complete building its new democratic army. By mid-2009, the new army should have replaced all foreign troops in urban areas while the remaining four of the 18 provinces come under Iraqi government control.

The pact will deny America's various enemies - from al Qaeda to the Khomeinist regime - an opportunity to claim that they forced the Americans out of Iraq. It also will enable America to consolidate its victory in Iraq by ensuring that the democratic institutions created since 2003 are safeguarded in new elections.

The US had two key objectives in Iraq:

* To dismantle what was left of Saddam Hussein's war machine, ensuring that it wasn't rebuilt and used against Iraq's neighbors or other nations.

* To restore to the people of Iraq the power that had been confiscated from them by the Ba'athist dictatorship.

Both have been achieved, ensuring a clear US victory - although many in Washington seem to believe that it would be impolite or impolitic to admit that. It is one of those ironies of history that Barack Obama, who opposed toppling Saddam Hussein, now inherits this victory.

America also benefits from the fact that, by signing SOFA, it shows that it isn't a fickle friend - that its commitment to allies isn't cast aside as a result of a change at the White House.

I think Taheri is overly generous to the incoming Oval Office Occupant.  Obama would be quite content to cast our Iraqi allies aside, but he's been boxed in, first by the victorious surge troops, and now by the S.O.F.A.  It will gall the Democrats mightily to know George Bush has achieved what he set out to do.  It should be entertaining to watch the ways in which their denial manifests itself.