Category Archives: Iraq

Honoring fallen heroes

Folks, this came in from the McCain campaign:

Dear Friends in South Carolina,

Please join Senator John McCain at 5:00pm on Friday, November
2nd, 2007 in honoring the memory of Lance Corporal Joshua L. Torrence, USMC. 
Joshua graduated from White Knoll High School in Lexington, SC where he made a
name for himself both in the classroom and on the football field.  He was the
epitome of a leader and a true team player.  Following his graduation in 2003,
Joshua selflessly answered the call to duty.  He enlisted in the United States
Marine Corps and was deployed to Iraq.  As those who knew Joshua will tell you,
it was no surprise that he volunteered to be transferred to Fallujah, where some
of the fiercest fighting of the war was taking place.  Sadly, he lost his life
while on patrol on March 14, 2005.

Because of their love of Joshua and their gratitude for his
service and sacrifice, members of the White Knoll High School community have
united in a remarkable way.  They have organized a massive grassroots campaign
in order to raise the $150,000 necessary to name the high school’s new field
house in Joshua’s honor.  Senator McCain will be attending the November 2nd
ceremony which will take place prior to the White Knoll vs. Lexington football
game.  Additionally, four of the 9/11 FDNY firefighters, who also play on the
FDNY football team, are flying to South Carolina to help honor Joshua’s
service.

Please join Senator McCain in supporting this
wonderful cause.  Your financial support is much appreciated.  This
event is non-political and 100% of the proceeds will go directly towards the
memorial field house.  To learn more about Joshua and how to help the community
accomplish their goal, please visit the following:

News coverage about the effort:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9AshUXXQoQw

Lance Corporal Joshua L. Torrence Memorial Field House
Committee Website:
https://www.edline.net/pages/White_Knoll_High_School/_LCPL_Joshua_Torrence_Memorial

Which reminds me that I had meant to bring your attention to this editorial in the WSJ yesterday. ItMichael_p_murphyltusn
was an editorial about the awarding of the third Medal of Honor in the war. It was presented to the family of Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy, a Navy SEAL who was killed in Afghanistan in 2005. An excerpt:

    The SEALs were at a tactical disadvantage and became pinned down in a ravine. Lt. Murphy, already wounded, moved out from behind cover, seeking open air for a radio signal to place a rescue call. He was shot several more times in the back. He dropped the transmitter, picked it back up and completed the call, and then rejoined the fight.

Only one of the four SEALS in the team would get out alive. Lt. Murphy was not one of them. The Journal’s conclusion:

    In Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is almost spoiled for choice when it comes to such instances of heroism and sacrifice. It is regrettable that these volunteers are too often rewarded with indifference by the U.S. political culture, where "supporting the troops" becomes nothing more than a slogan when there is a score to settle. The representative men in this war are soldiers like Lt. Murphy.

Thank God for Lt. Murphy and those like him. And may God send solace and strength to his family. Those are his parents, Maureen and Daniel, below, with Navy Secretary Donald Winter at left.

Medal_of_honorii

Times: Thin Red Line extends into Iran

Just in case you thought that a) the Tommies were bowing out of the fight, or b) nobody in the Western alliance was doing anything but talking about Iran, Réalité EU‘s International Media Intelligence Analysis brings this report to our attention:

SAS Special Forces Ops in Iran
Britain ‘s Sunday Times reports that British SAS and American
and Australian Special Forces have been engaged in operations inside the Iranian
border to interdict weapons shipments. There have been at least half a dozen
intense firefights between the SAS and arms smugglers, a mixture of Iranians and
Shi’ite militiamen. The unreported fighting straddles the border between Iran
and Iraq and has also involved the Iranian military firing mortars into Iraq .
UK commanders are concerned that Iran is using a militia ceasefire to step up
arms supplies in preparation for an offensive against their base at Basra
airport. An SAS squadron is carrying out operations along the Iranian border in
Maysan and Basra provinces with other special forces, the Australian SAS and
American special-operations troops. They are patrolling the border, ambushing
arms smugglers bringing in surface-to-air missiles and components for roadside
bombs. “Last month, they were involved in six significant contacts, which killed
17 smugglers and recovered weapons, explosives and missiles,” a source said. It
was not clear if any of the dead were Iranian.

You’ll notice that our boys are involved too — but that’s on the Q.T.

Hessians: This Year’s Model

Reading an editorial for tomorrow about Blackwater, I wonder that we haven’t heard an appropriate lyrical allusion from bill on the subject. Well, I guess I’ll just have to do it myself:

 Don’t you know I got the bully boys out/
changing someone’s facial design…

Come to think of it, why not just use the whole song?

Hand In Hand
No, don’t ask me to apologise.
I won’t ask you to forgive me.
If I’m gonna go down,
you’re gonna come with me

You say ‘Why don’t you be a man about it,
like they do in the grown-up movies?’
But when it comes to the other way around,
you say you just wanna use me. Oh,
you sit and you wonder whether
it’s gonna be syndicated.
You sit with your knees together.
All the time your breath is baited.

Hand in Hand.
No, don’t ask me to apologise.
I won’t ask you to forgive me.
If I’m gonna go down,
you’re gonna come with me

Don’t you know I got the bully boys out
changing someone’s facial design,
sitting with my toy room lout,
polishing my precious china
Don’t you know I’m an animal?
But don’t you know I can’t stand up steady?
But you can’t show me any kind of hell
that I don’t know already.

Hand in Hand.
No, don’t ask me to apologise.
I won’t ask you to forgive me.
If I’m gonna go down,
you’re gonna come with me
Hand in hand, hand in hand, hand in hand…

Now, for serious commentary on the subject, you’ll have to read tomorrow’s editorial page. In the meantime, I’ll say the performance of these rent-a-commandos are about as perfect an example of the problem with privatizing the natural functions of government as you’re ever likely to find.

Having shrunk the segment of government with this responsibility (the military), although thankfully not quite enough to drown it in a bathtub, we have generated a private-sector demand that is sufficiently lucrative so as to make it unbelievably tempting to some of our best warriors to go private. That weakens the U.S. military at a time we can ill afford it, and turns these exemplary soldiers into "weapons-free" mercenaries who are unconstrained by the military’s rules of engagement.

So we find ourselves, at a time when we’re painstakingly working to win hearts and minds to the counterinsurgency cause (the Petraeus strategy), with these hyperagressive private Rambos running around giving our country (and our allies’ countries, for that matter) an increasing worse name with the local indigenous population.

Privatization might work in some areas (although far, far fewer that the libertarians fantasize), but there’s one area where we must have political accountability: War-making.

Heroes vs. victims

A member of my Rotary club brought this Robert Kaplan piece in the WSJ to my attention:

I’m weary of seeing news stories about wounded soldiers and assertions of "support" for the troops mixed with suggestions of the futility of our military efforts in Iraq. Why aren’t there more accounts of what the troops actually do? How about narrations of individual battles and skirmishes, of their ever-evolving interactions with Iraqi troops and locals in Baghdad and Anbar province, and of increasingly resourceful "patterning" of terrorist networks that goes on daily in tactical operations centers?

The sad and often unspoken truth of the matter is this: Americans have been conditioned less to understand Iraq’s complex military reality than to feel sorry for those who are part of it.

I wrote back that I agreed completely. That’s why I wrote essentially the same column back in 2005.

Obama’s elevator small talk

Obama

Based upon the umpteenth statement I’ve read along these lines, here’s my impression of Barack Obama making small talk on an elevator:

"Yes indeed, the weather is very fine today. Come to think of it, the air felt much like this on the day in 2002 when I voiced my highly principled, adamant opposition to the Iraq War. Let me tell you about it…"

‘Prudence’ or ‘timidity’? Chris Dodd thinks he can win, too

Someone brought this Des Moines Register piece to my attention. It seems Joe Biden isn’t the only longshot on the Democratic side who thinks he can win.

Of course, Chris Dodd’s pinning his hopes on voters who look at prudence and see it as "timidity:"

Published October 2, 2007
Yepsen: 1st-tier Dems’ timidity on Iraq may create opening
David Yepsen
    Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd is the longest of long-shot candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. But he doesn’t seem too agitated about that.
    He’s an experienced politician. He knows how the caucus game often breaks late. Because of his 33 years of experience in Congress, he also knows something about U.S. foreign policy and the war in Iraq.
    He does get agitated about that, particularly when the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination appear to be in no big hurry to get out. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all declined in last week’s debate to say they’d have U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of their first term – in 2013.
    "I was stunned, literally stunned" to hear them say that, Dodd said in an interview for last weekend’s Iowa Press program on Iowa Public Television. "It was breathtaking to me that the so-called three leading candidates would not make that commitment. That’s six years from today."…

Time to get real in Iraq debate

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
NOW THAT we’ve put a fortnight and more between us and the Petraeus testimony, can we go ahead and have a realistic, honest, come-to-Jesus kind of discussion about Iraq?
    I think we can. The “surge” has created that opportunity.
    The idea behind Gen. David Petraeus’ strategy was this: Apply enough force in the right places, and you can create a secure space in which a political settlement can be achieved.
    The promised measure of security has been achieved. Just as importantly, there is broader acceptance in this country that significant U.S. forces will be staying in Iraq for some time. The consistently implied threat that we might yank our troops out at any moment contributed greatly to insecurity in that nation — encouraging terrorists, and discouraging would-be allies from working with us against the terrorists.
    For the moment, that threat is gone. If it wasn’t obvious before, it was certainly on display at a Democratic candidates’ debate at Dartmouth last week. The three candidates most likely to win their party’s presidential nomination moved beyond the fantasy that’s been offered too often to their base — that we could have the troops out of Iraq before George W. Bush leaves the White House. They acknowledged that in fact, we can’t even promise to be out by the time the next president’s first term is up in 2013.
    That was a significant step. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards have walked a razor’s edge for some time, trying to say things that please the “pull ’em out now!” constituency, while at the same time leaving themselves room to be pragmatic and sensible later on, should they be so fortunate as to find themselves in a general election campaign.
    This can sometimes lead to dissonance. For instance, in the debate, Barack Obama repeated confusing assertions he made in an op-ed column in The State, in which he first said “all of our combat brigades should be out of Iraq by the end of next year.” But his very next words were “We will then need to retain some forces to strike at al-Qaida in Iraq.” OK, if all of the combat units are out, what will we “strike at” them with? Boy Scouts? Or will the units used to “strike” be smaller than brigade strength? If so, how effective do we think they’ll be? Isn’t this a return to the “less is more,” minimalist force approach that led to the failures of the thoroughly discredited Donald Rumsfeld? If we’re going to free up “combat brigades” from other, nonspecified tasks, why don’t we send them after al-Qaida too?
    But the magic number “2013” provides a measure of clarity. It says, We’re there. We’re going to be there. So what are we going to do now?
    The question works both ways. Once Democrats accept that we can’t bug out, they can start getting real about what maintaining a commitment means. One answer was offered last week. The Senate majority took a break from futile, please-the-base gestures long enough to join in a bipartisan resolution supporting the idea of dividing Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions — a proposal long advocated by Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Sam Brownback.
    But “What next?” applies with equal force to Republicans who backed the “surge” all along: Now that our soldiers have done their job, where’s the political settlement in Baghdad?
    Sen. Lindsey Graham surprised some last week when he told TIME magazine that he’s willing to give the Maliki government until Christmas to get its act together, and not much more than that.
    What? Is one of the biggest fans of the surge, as “never say die” as anyone, ready to throw in the towel? No. But with the U.S. military having done, and continuing to do, its job, no one can make excuses for an Iraqi government that doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity thus provided.
    “The challenges and the problem areas in Iraq are not lost on me as a big fan of the surge,” he told me over the phone Friday. “I’m trying to let people know that when you say the political is not moving at the appropriate pace, I agree with you, and I acknowledge” it.
    “I want people to acknowledge the security gains, because they’re real, and quit trying to minimalize them. That’s just not fair.” Nor would it be fair or reasonable, he suggested, for him or anybody else to make excuses for political stalemate.
    “I would be the first to say, 90 days from now, if they haven’t delivered anything… regarding the major political reconciliation benchmarks, that it would be clear to me they’ve gone from just being dysfunctional to a failure,” Sen. Graham said.
    At that point, “We need to look at a new model: Is it wise to give more money to the same people when it’s clear they don’t know what they’re doing, or are incapable of performing?”
    That does not, of course, mean pulling our troops out. It is the continued troop presence that gives us the options we have — and puts the onus on the Iraqi government.
    For his part, Sen. Graham was not among the three-fourths of the Senate that endorsed Sen. Biden’s partition. To him, giving in to the idea that Sunni and Shi’a can never live together is as objectionable as endorsing Apartheid as a way of keeping the peace in South Africa.
    Others disagree. But the wonderful thing is that we are now disagreeing about a way forward, rather than arguing about how quickly we can back out.
    With progress like that, I can actually believe that a political solution can be achieved — in Iraq and, yes, even in Washington.

Graham sets Iraq deadline: 90 days

This was just brought to my attention:

    Sen. Lindsey Graham, a pivotal Republican vote in the U.S. Senate on Iraq policy, is willing to give the government of Iraq until Christmas to get its act together.
    But not much more.
    Graham told TIME Wednesday that the Iraqi leaders have 90 days to start resolving their political differences with real legislative agreements or face a change in strategy by the U.S. "If they can’t do it in 90 days," he said, "it means the major players don’t want to." …

I’m going to see if I can get ahold of Lindsey for some elaboration…

You gotta keep ’em separated

Just now I was listening to the latest Democratic debate and heard Biden talking about Iraq partition, and it reminded me — I’ve gotten exactly zero feedback from our lead editorial Sunday. It took a big new step in the direction of the Biden-Brownback plan, of which I had previously been leery.

Did anybody read it? Did you have any thoughts about it?

Unedited McCain footage

   


Today, I was "on the bus," as Ken Kesey would put it, with John McCain, attending events in Aiken and Lexington, and riding with the senator on his "No Surrender Tour" bus in between.

I have a lot more material than I can go through today, but in order not to keep my readers waiting entirely, here’s some fairly representative footage from the Lexington event — formally, the "Veterans Appreciation Lunch and No Surrender Rally," at 11:45 a.m. at the American Legion Post 7, just off just off Harmon Street.

The theme for the tour, which ends tonight in Charleston, was the war in Iraq, with McCain presenting points he’s been stressing — well, forever, really, but particularly since the Petraeus testimony last week. His message was pitched as an advance of what’s likely to happen next in the Senate, with Democrats and the president resuming the monotony of putting up an amendment with a withdrawal date, having it knocked down, putting up another one, etc.

Turnout was good at both events. You can see the SRO crowd at this one; the one in Aiken was much the same.

That’s all for now.

Video for you Democrats, too

Well, it turns out that you don’t have to wait for tomorrow for video of, or at least about, Democrats:

I haven’t had time today to read or digest any of this stuff today — I was offered the chance to join a conference call with Obama on the subject, but was too tied up with previous commitments — so why don’t y’all dig into it and offer your thoughts? (A quick skim of the Obama statement wasn’t promising, I’m sorry to say. The "plan" part was stuff I’ve heard before, and it mostly looked like a vehicle for repeating over and over, in case you missed it before, that OBAMA OPPOSED THE WAR IN IRAQ FROM THE BEGINNING.

Finally — still mining the rich vein of e-mail I don’t have time to read, much less think about — here we have Chris Dodd (remember him?) taking shots at both Clinton and Obama (and why? because they actually have a chance of winning the nomination, unlike a certain white-haired gentleman I could name). Just click on the headline to get the full release text:

DODD BLASTS OBAMA AND CLINTON FOR TAKING STEP BACKWARD, LACK OF CLARITY ON IRAQ

That’s all for now.

Part of the Democratic base is in for a bitter disappointment

Flash forward to January 2009, and what do you see? Here’s what I see — a profoundly disaffected portion of the Democratic base.

They’ll either be furious because the GOP will have won the White House for another four years, or furious because a Democrat won, and yet we still have troops in Iraq.

Now mind you, I’m basing this on my assumption that neither Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul nor Mike Gravel is president. Indulge me in this for a moment, if you will.

If you look at comments by responsible, grownup-type Democratic elected officials in response to the Petraeus testimony, you get respectful quibbling over matters of degree — maybe we should draw down a little more quickly, or some such.

It’s only among the unelected professional whack jobs out there whipping up the grass roots that you hear Let’s pull every last American in uniform out of Iraq yesterday!

This is a disconnect that could have serious repercussions, not only for the Democratic party, but for the country.

The problem is that Democratic elected officials, who know better, have thought they had to humor the more excitable antiwar folks up to now, and have never felt like they could say, Hold on, folks — what you’re asking for is completely unrealistic. Think what you want about the decision to go into Iraq — and I’m with you that that was a bad call — but now that we’re there we’re stuck with this problem on our hands for some time to come.

The only way to avoid the crash between reality and expectations that I predicted at the top of this post will be if some of the top Democrats start leveling more along those lines. If not, look for a real mess in 2009.

Six years on, adrift in a partisan sea

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
BACK IN the days of sailing ships, there arose a reassuring naval ritual: The captain would gather his midshipmen on the quarterdeck at the same time each day to “shoot the sun” with their sextants. The object was to establish the time — noon — and the ship’s location on the globe. It also fixed the positions of that captain and those aspiring officers in their societies and in history.
    At noon on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the attacks on America, I tried shooting The Associated Press for a fix on where we are as a nation. Searching for “9/11,” I got 23 hits within the past 24 hours. Here are a few of them:

  • Right here in Columbia, S.C., “First responders and relatives of victims of the 2001 terror attacks were to gather” for a ceremony in which they would sign a steel beam traveling the country. It would “be used in the construction of a museum at the site of the World Trade Center.”
  • Security improvements at the Pentagon have left it “less the office building it was and more a fortress. A burgeoning police force has been given state-of-the-art capabilities to protect against a chemical, biological or radiological attack. Stricter access is being imposed, with fewer vehicles able to drive or park close to the building. Structural improvements allow the building to better withstand blast and fire.”Afghanistan
  • Three photographs showed the wares of Afghan carpet sellers in Kabul who sell crudely woven woolen images of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. The captions are wondrously vague, failing to make it clear whether the commemorations are sympathetic or celebratory: “An Afghan carpet seller chats with a friend, not seen, as a small hand-made carpet is seen on the ground featuring the attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center….”
  • “Felicia Dunn-Jones, who died just five months” after she inhaled part of “the toxic dust cloud that enveloped lower Manhattan,” was for the first time about to be mourned officially as the 2,750th victim of the attacks. The story goes into the acrimony surrounding the treatment of those who fell ill after that day.

    There was also coverage of a commemorative march, a psychology feature on how survivors of theFreedom attacks have become more “decisive” in their daily lives, a story that speculated whether Rudy Giuliani’s mob-busting resume was as important as his 9/11 image to his political future (no, said one expert), and some baseball linescores that happened to contain the numbers “9” and “11.”
    A group of midshipmen trying to reconcile these varied readings would have trouble finding their way. So as captain of this column, I decided to point my sextant at one point, and call it noon:

    Some balance: “While 83 percent of Republicans say the U.S. campaign against terrorism is going well, only 37 percent of Democrats agree.”
    Finally, a solid, accurate reading. I know exactly where I am — drifting in the American homefront doldrums, where the state of the world is a matter of partisan interpretation, a place where “Just one-quarter say the nation is ‘much’ safer than six years ago, 15 percent express a ‘great deal’ of confidence in the government’s ability to prevent attacks, and 8 percent say the fight against terrorism is going ‘very’ well. By contrast, two-thirds worry ‘a great deal’ or ‘somewhat’ about major terrorist attacks.”
    I find I want to set all the canvas my masts and spars will bear, to sail this ship as far from this place as I can get, as quickly as it can go. And I’d like to take the rest of my country with me.
    When I contemplate the schizophrenic responses of my fellow Americans even on something so basic and simple and existential as whether they think they are “safe” or not, I think almost any point in time would be better than this noon in this place.
    For instance, I’d prefer to be in the United States of September 2001. At that time, with the shock of horrific events fresh, we were too wise to be partisan. We saw ourselves as having a shared destiny, which we did (and do). Then, the opportunities of the past six years had not yet been missed.
    We still had the chance to take our NATO allies up on a joint fight against terror. The president of the United States had a golden opportunity to enlist us all in changing our lives to meet this challenge, particularly with regard to our dependence on foreign oil. Osama bin Laden had not yet slipped away from us at Tora Bora.
    The various opportunities to secure Iraq quickly and early had not been blown. No one had stood before a “Mission Accomplished” banner. We had not heard of Abu Ghraib. The Golden Mosque was still intact.
    Most of all, Americans of both political parties were united with us independents in wanting our country to succeed on the foreign battlefields where our troops fight real battles, ones in which life and death are not metaphors, and are immune to political interpretation.
    Just above my search results I see a banner on The Associated Press Web site and I click on it:
    “Gen. David Petraeus went before a deeply divided Congress on Monday, the commander of 165,000 troops heckled and attacked by anti-war critics before he began to speak. ‘Tell the truth, general,’ shouted protesters as the four-star general made his way into the crowded hearing room.”
    My God. Check your sextants again, young gentlemen. How did we ever get this far off course?

Have we lost the war? Dems say yes, most say no

Here’s a crucial split in the electorate: Zogby says that while most Americans say the war in Iraq is not a lost cause, two out of three Democrats take the Harry Reid view:

A majority of Americans – 54% – believe the United States has not
lost the war in Iraq, but there is dramatic disagreement on the question between
Democrats and Republicans, a new UPI/Zogby Interactive poll shows. While two in
three Democrats (66%) said the war effort has already failed, just 9% of
Republicans say the same.

There’s a certain absurdity in focusing on whether Americans think the war is lost, as opposed to whether it is, which is a different thing entirely.

Unfortunately for the soldiers with their lives on the line, whether their struggles are for naught or not depends upon the political environment back home. So, as wrong as it may seem, a professional soldier can be kicking insurgent butt while winning hearts and minds among those Iraqis who want a decent country to live in, but if enough Americans back home are convinced it’s useless, the battle is lost. Why? Because the despair-mongers back home will say — regardless of reality on the ground — come home.

Weird, ain’t it? But so is life in our increasingly democratic republic.

That infuriating John McCain, or, How do you pitch to a hero?

Mccain1

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
HOW ARE YOU supposed to do your job with professional detachment when every time you see one of the main guys running for president, every time you read about him, every time he opens his mouth or takes an action in public, you think, “Hero”?
    How are you supposed to keep your rep when you keep thinking, I admire this guy? Of all things, admire! It’s embarrassing.
    On top of that, how do you do it when so many of the smart, hip, unfettered, scalpel-minded professionals around you snort when the hero’s name is mentioned, and use terms like “has-been” and “loser” and “that poor old guy”?
    It’s not easy. Maybe it’s not even possible. It wasn’t possible on Monday, when John McCain visited our editorial board.
    I presided as usual, asking most of the questions and so forth. But I never quite hit my stride. I was uneasy; I stumbled in bringing forth the simplest questions. It was weird. I’d pitched to this guy a number of times before with no trouble, even in post-season play. And here he was stepping up to bat in my ball park, where the rubber on the mound has molded itself to my cleats, and I can’t put a simple fastball over the plate, much less a curve.
    I kept remembering our last formal meeting with him, in 2000, on the day that we would decide whomMccain3
to endorse in a GOP primary that would either slingshot him onward toward victory, or enable George W. Bush to stop his insurgency cold. I wasn’t out of sorts like this. I had stated my case — my strong belief that we should endorse Sen. McCain — several days before in a 4,000-word memo to my then-publisher, a committed Bush man. I was fully prepared to make it again to the full board once the candidate left the room. And I was ready to lose like a pro if it came to that. Which it did.
    But now, 9/11 has happened. The nation is at war, and bitterly divided, even over whether we’re “at war.” And I keep thinking — as I sit a couple of feet from the candidate, aiming my digital camera with my left hand, scribbling the occasional haphazard note with my right, glancing from time to time at the audio recorder on the table to note how many minutes into the interview he said such-and-such, so busy recording the event that I don’t really have time to be there — this is the guy who should have been president for the past seven years.
    The odd thing is, a lot of people who now dismiss the McCain candidacy also believe he should have been president — that we’d be less divided at home, more admired abroad, more successful at war. But they talk like the poor old guy missed his chance. It’s like candidates have “sell by” dates stamped on them like bacon, and his was several years back. Too bad for him, they say. But I think, too bad for the nation — if they’re right.
    The best thing for me, as a professional critic, as a jaded observer, would be for those people to be right. I have no trouble assessing the relative merits of the other candidates in either major party. I even like some of them. Life could be good, professionally speaking, if that old “hero” guy really did just fade away.
    But he doesn’t. There he is, sitting there, being all honest and straightforward and fair-minded and brave and admirable. Dang.
    Go ahead, get mad at him. He’s let the moment get away from him. You can’t take a man seriously as a leader when he’s blown all that money only to lose ground, when he can’t stop his hired rats from diving overboard. Focus on his mottled scars. Murmur about how even the best of men slow down with age.
    But then you think about how this guy aged early. You look at his awkwardness as he holds his coffee cup, and you think about how the North Vietnamese strung him up by his broken arms, and all he had to do to end it was agree to go home. But he wouldn’t.
    That was then, of course, but it’s just as bad now. Think about how you asked him several months ago why he thought he had to do something about immigration now, when the only people who cared passionately about the issue and would vote on the basis of that one thing were the ones who would hate him forever for being sensible about it. He had no excuse; he just thought it was the right thing to do.
Mccainstarbucks
    You think of all the Democrats and “moderates” who egged him on when he was Bush’s No. 1 critic (which he still is, if you actually listen), but who now dismiss him as the president’s “lapdog” because he (gasp!) — supports the surge and actually, if you can stand it, thinks it’s working! These political goldfish forget that their favorite maverick criticized Bush for not sending enough troops, so of course he supports a “surge” when the president knuckles under and implements one.
    Oh, but don’t speak of such people dismissively. This ridiculously admirable guy at the end of the table, who long ago forgave both his communist torturers and the protesters at home who would have spit on him given the chance, won’t have it. When I speak less than flatteringly of the impatience of Americans on Iraq, he corrects me, and relates a list of perfectly good reasons for them to be fed up.
    So when it’s over, you try to produce a McCain column for Wednesday, but you can’t. Wednesday, Sam Brownback steps to the same plate, and your arm is fine. You interrogate the guy, assess him, reach a conclusion, and slap a column on the Thursday page. Three up, three down. You’ve got your stuff back.
    But Sunday’s deadline draws nearer, and it’s gone again. Desperate, you think: How about a bulleted list of what he said Monday? There’s plenty of it. Naw, that’s a news story, not an opinion column.
    And you know, you just know, that the one thing you can’t write is the truth, which is that you just admire the hell out of this infuriating old guy. The fans won’t stand for it. You can hear the beer bottles clattering around you on the mound already.
    But it’s no use. You just can’t get the ball across today.

For actual information regarding the McCain interview, and more, go to http://blogs.
thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

Mccain4

John McCain videos

Here are clips from portions of the editorial board’s meeting with John McCain on Monday. These, as usual on this blog, were shot by me with my little Canon digital still camera that also shoots short video clips.  You can find some higher-quality video from the meeting, shot by Andy Haworth of thestate.com, by following this link.

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"The Surge is Winning:"
McCain on Iraq

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"They didn’t believe us:"
Why the immigration bill failed

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Why we don’t need a draft:
McCain on the military

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"Look at the Region:"
The War on Terror, beyond Iraq

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"I’m prepared:"
Why he can, and should, win in 2008

   

McCain on The Extremely Dramatic and Sincere Showdown in the Senate

I hadn’t really paid much attention to the "filibuster" going on last night, because I’ve been extremely busy (Mike called in sick today, so I’m doing all our production today again on top of my regular job, which doesn’t have anything to do with blogging, either), and because, well — they didn’t do it for me.

They did it as a show for all those really, really emotional people out there who want to see them trying really hard to magically make the Iraq war go away. They don’t intend to make the war go away, of course, because they don’t have the slightest idea how to do that, because it’s not possible to get a 60-vote majority together to do it (David Brooks, to whom I can’t link because he’s New York Times, so sorry, spelled out the senatorial math on that a few days ago), and, I suspect, because some of them are smart enough to realize it would be crazy to pull out, they’re just not about to say so out loud.

OK, I was really guessing on that last reason, so if it’s not true, sorry again.

Anyway, John McCain is a U.S. senator and doesn’t have the luxury of not paying attention to the histrionics. If I were in his position — forced to deal with such theater as though it were a real thing going on in the real world (like the war itself) — I’d probably say something like what he said on the Senate floor this morning:

    Mr. President, we have nearly finished this little exhibition, which was staged, I assume, for the benefit of a briefly amused press corps and in deference to political activists opposed to the war who have come to expect from Congress such gestures, empty though they may be, as proof that the majority in the Senate has heard their demands for action to end the war in Iraq. The outcome of this debate, the vote we are about to take, has never been in doubt to a single member of this body. And to state the obvious, nothing we have done for the last twenty-four hours will have changed any facts on the ground in Iraq or made the outcome of the war any more or less important to the security of our country. The stakes in this war remain as high today as they were yesterday; the consequences of an American defeat are just as grave; the costs of success just as dear. No battle will have been won or lost, no enemy will have been captured or killed, no ground will have been taken or surrendered, no soldier will have survived or been wounded, died or come home because we spent an entire night delivering our poll-tested message points, spinning our soundbites, arguing with each other, and substituting our amateur theatrics for statesmanship. All we have achieved are remarkably similar newspaper accounts of our inflated sense of the drama of this display and our own temporary physical fatigue. Tomorrow the press will move on to other things and we will be better rested. But nothing else will have changed.
    In Iraq, American soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen are still fighting bravely and tenaciously in battles that are as dangerous, difficult and consequential as the great battles of our armed forces’ storied past. Our enemies will still be intent on defeating us, and using our defeat to encourage their followers in the jihad they wage against us, a war which will become a greater threat to us should we quit the central battlefield in defeat. The Middle East will still be a tinderbox, which our defeat could ignite in a regional war that will imperil our vital interests at risk there and draw us into a longer and far more costly war. The prospect of genocide in Iraq, in which we will be morally complicit, is still as real a consequence of our withdrawal today as it was yesterday.
    During our extended debate over the last few days, I have heard senators repeat certain arguments over and over again. My friends on the other side of this argument accuse those of us who oppose this amendment with advocating "staying the course," which is intended to suggest that we are intent on continuing the mistakes that have put the outcome of the war in doubt. Yet we all know that with the arrival of General Petraeus we have changed course. We are now fighting a counterinsurgency strategy, which some of us have argued we should have been following from the beginning, and which makes the most effective use of our strength and does not strengthen the tactics of our enemy. This new battle plan is succeeding where our previous tactics have failed, although the outcome remains far from certain. The tactics proposed in the amendment offered by my friends, Senators Levin and Reed a smaller force, confined to bases distant from the battlefield, from where they will launch occasional search and destroy missions and train the Iraqi military are precisely the tactics employed for most of this war and which have, by anyone’s account, failed miserably. Now, that, Mr. President, is staying the course, and it is a course that inevitably leads to our defeat and the catastrophic consequences for Iraq, the region and the security of the United States our defeat would entail.
    Yes, we have heard quite a lot about the folly of "staying the course," though the real outcome should this amendment prevail and be signed into law, would be to deny our generals and the Americans they have the honor to command the ability to try, in this late hour, to address the calamity these tried and failed tactics produced, and salvage from the wreckage of our previous failures a measure of stability for Iraq and the Middle East, and a more secure future for the American people.
     I have also listened to my colleagues on the other side repeatedly remind us that the American people have spoken in the last election. They have demanded we withdraw from Iraq, and it is our responsibility to do, as quickly as possible, what they have bid us to do. But is that our primary responsibility? Really, Mr. President, is that how we construe our role: to follow without question popular opinion even if we believe it to be in error, and likely to endanger the security of the country we have sworn to defend? Surely, we must be responsive to the people who have elected us to office, and who, if it is their wish, will remove us when they become unsatisfied with our failure to heed their demands. I understand that, of course. And I understand why so many Americans have become sick and tired of this war, given the many, many mistakes made by civilian and military leaders in its prosecution. I, too, have been made sick at heart by these mistakes and the terrible price we have paid for them. But I cannot react to these mistakes by embracing a course of action that I know will be an even greater mistake, a mistake of colossal historical proportions, which will — and I am as sure of this as I am of anything seriously endanger the people I represent and the country I have served all my adult life. I have many responsibilities to the people of Arizona, and to all Americans. I take them all seriously, Mr. President, or try to. But I have one responsibility that outweighs all the others and that is to do everything in my power, to use whatever meager talents I posses, and every resource God has granted me to protect the security of this great and good nation from all enemies foreign and domestic. And that I intend to do, Mr. President, even if I must stand athwart popular opinion. I will explain my reasons to the American people. I will attempt to convince as many of my countrymen as I can that we must show even greater patience, though our patience is nearly exhausted, and that as long as there is a prospect for not losing this war, then we must not choose to lose it. That is how I construe my responsibility to my constituency and my country. That is how I construed it yesterday. It is how I construe it today. And it is how I will construe it tomorrow. I do not know how I could choose any other course.
     I cannot be certain that I possess the skills to be persuasive. I cannot be certain that even if I could convince Americans to give General Petraeus the time he needs to determine whether we can prevail, that we will prevail in Iraq. All I am certain of is that our defeat there would be catastrophic, not just for Iraq, but for us, and that I cannot be complicit in it, but must do whatever I can, whether I am effective or not, to help us try to avert it. That, Mr. President, is all I can possibly offer my country at this time. It is not much compared to the sacrifices made by Americans who have volunteered to shoulder a rifle and fight this war for us. I know that, and am humbled by it, as we all are. But though my duty is neither dangerous nor onerous, it compels me nonetheless to say to my colleagues and to all Americans who disagree with me: that as long as we have a chance to succeed we must try to succeed.
     I am privileged, as we all are, to be subject to the judgment of the American people and history. But, my friends, they are not always the same judgment. The verdict of the people will arrive long before history’
s. I am unlikely to ever know how history has judged us in this hour. The public’s judgment of me I will know soon enough. I will accept it, as I must. But whether it is favorable or unforgiving, I will stand where I stand, and take comfort from my confidence that I took my responsibilities to my country seriously, and despite the mistakes I have made as a public servant and the flaws I have as an advocate, I tried as best I could to help the country we all love remain as safe as she could be in an hour of serious peril.

Video: Graham, Lieberman, others on Iraq

Just got this video release. I haven’t even had time to look at it — except to see that Lindsey Graham (whose office sent it) and Joe Lieberman appear on the screen. It appears initially to be about this:

AP-BC WAR POST
//Senate Signals Move Toward Major Change in Iraq Strategy//(Washn)
By Shailagh Murray and Jonathan

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan consensus to dramatically alter the U.S. military mission in Iraq began to emerge Wednesday in the Senate, but no specific approach has yet attracted the broad support necessary for a veto-proof majority.

… Wednesday, on the first in a series of Iraq amendments to the annual
defense policy bill, seven GOP senators voted with Democrats to break a
Republican filibuster of a proposal from Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., to
require longer troop rest periods between combat deployments. Six of
the seven Republicans are vulnerable 2008 incumbents. The effort still
failed 56 to 41, with 60 votes needed for passage. But the seven
Republican votes were surprising, considering that a similar measure in
the House last spring was roundly denounced by Republicans as a "slow
bleed strategy."…

I’ve got several hours of work before I can stop to review it myself. You look, and react if you choose…

Moving forward in Iraq — the one good idea

The Wonderland of Washington, driven by polls and 24/7 TV, is its own, separate reality. Unfortunately, the TV-watching public and partisan activists think it’s the reality.

Meanwhile, over in Iraq, the surge is doing what it was intended to do, as this piece back on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal — under the appropriate headline, "Moving Forward in Iraq" — reports:

    In Washington perception is often mistaken for reality. And as Congress prepares for a fresh debate on Iraq, the perception many members have is that the new strategy has already failed.
    This isn’t an accurate reflection of what is happening on the ground, as I saw during my visit to Iraq in May. Reports from the field show that remarkable progress is being made. Violence in Baghdad and Anbar Province is down dramatically, grassroots political movements have begun in the Sunni Arab community, and American and Iraqi forces are clearing al Qaeda fighters and Shiite militias out of long-established bases around the country.
    This is remarkable because the military operation that is making these changes possible only began in full strength on June 15. To say that the surge is failing is absurd. Instead Congress should be asking this question: Can the current progress continue?

That’s the way it starts. I hope the link works so that you can read the whole thing. The next  10 or so paragraphs go into greater detail about the ways in which the surge is working. The author, Kimberly Kagan, is "an affiliate of Harvard’s John M. Olin Institute of Strategic Studies, is executive director of the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. She even tries to express some optimism about Mr. Maliki’s efforts to achieve the strategic aim of the surge, a political solution. That part is somewhat less convincing. But the part about what our military is achieving is convincing.

What would be wonderful — what we owe our troops — is to praise and applaud and encourage what they are accomplishing. But that’s not what we’re doing back in this country, is it?

The piece ends this way:

    This is war, and the enemy is reacting. The enemy uses
suicide bombs, car bombs and brutal executions to break our will and
that of our Iraqi allies. American casualties often increase as troops
move into areas that the enemy has fortified; these casualties will
start to fall again once the enemy positions are destroyed. Al Qaeda
will manage to get some car and truck bombs through, particularly in
areas well-removed from the capital and its belts.
    But we should not allow individual atrocities to
obscure the larger picture. A new campaign has just begun, it is
already yielding important results, and its effects are increasing
daily. Demands for withdrawal are no longer demands to pull out of a
deteriorating situation with little hope; they are now demands to end a
new approach to this conflict that shows every sign of succeeding.

Indeed. And that demand is coming from both Democrats and Republicans. What is happening in this country is an appalling spectacle.