Month: May 2007

Just when you thought that he was beyond all relevance to current events, Henry Kissinger rears his head by way of an LA Times op ed piece, and completely confirms it.  Well, mostly.

His thinking is that the resolution of the Iraqi war can best be understood by examining events that brought about the end of the Viet Nam war.  And it is his theory that those opposing the Viet Nam war had a large role in bringing about an unsatisfactory closure.

Link

Of course, history never repeats itself exactly. Vietnam and Iraq are different conflicts in different times, but there is an important similarity: A point was reached during the Vietnam War when the domestic debate became so bitter as to preclude rational discussion of hard choices. Administrations of both political parties perceived the survival of South Vietnam as a significant national interest. They were opposed by a protest movement that coalesced behind the conviction that the war reflected an amorality that had to be purged by confrontational methods. This impasse doomed the U.S. effort in Vietnam; it must not be repeated over Iraq.

Yes, until the anti war movement first arose in the 1960s and gained the public’s attention things were going so very well.  It was largely do to those damned hippies that it all turned out so badly.

It must begin with dispelling the myth that the Nixon administration settled in 1972 for terms that had been available in 1969 and therefore prolonged the war needlessly. Whether the agreement, officially signed in January 1973, could have preserved an independent South Vietnam and avoided the carnage following the fall of Indochina will never be known. We do know that American disunity prevented such an outcome when Congress prohibited the use of military force to maintain the agreement and cut off aid after all U.S. military forces (except a few hundred advisors) had left South Vietnam. American dissociation triggered a massive North Vietnamese invasion, in blatant violation of existing agreements, to which the nations that had endorsed these agreements turned their backs.

See, Henry, it’s always been my understanding that the government serves the wishes of the people, and not the other way around.  But while we’re rewriting history, why stop there?

With respect to President Nixon’s alleged desired terms for ending the Viet Nam war:

American disunity was a major element in dashing these hopes. Watergate fatally weakened the Nixon administration through its own mistakes, and the 1974 midterm congressional elections brought to power the most unforgiving of Nixon’s opponents, who cut off aid so the agreement couldn’t work as planned. The imperatives of domestic debate took precedence over geopolitical necessities.

So the preferred way is just STFU, and unify.  Because to do otherwise would frustrate the grand design of our fearless leader and his fellow neocons.  (and possibly impact upon corporate cash flow!)

Two lessons emerge from this account. A strategic design cannot be achieved on a fixed, arbitrary deadline; it must reflect conditions on the ground.

But it also must not test the endurance of the American public to a point where the outcome can no longer be sustained by our political process. In Iraq, rapid, unilateral withdrawal would be disastrous. At the same time, a political solution remains imperative.

So things in Iraq could actually be worse?

But finally Henry actually has some good advice.

…President Bush owes it to his successor to make as much progress toward this goal as possible; not to hand the problem over but to reduce it to more manageable proportions. What we need most is a rebuilding of bipartisanship in both this presidency and in the next.

I was trying to take photos of the ducks, when this appeared in my lense.

Pacha, camera hog.

Download the Summons & Complaint (PDF) filed today in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.

Well, the CIA pushed Valerie into a corner and she has now pushed back.  This is not a case about Valerie wanting to give away national security secrets.  She’s not going to divulge sources and methods that CIA censors disallow.  It is simply about being able to put on paper what any person who has ever heard the name, Valerie Plame, knows.

She started at the CIA in September of 1985 and we were in the same Career Trainee class.  Every single member of our class was undercover from day one.  She would have stayed anonymous to the world were it not for the actions of Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and Richard Armitage.   At that point, anyone who had  worked with her became aware of her CIA connection.

(cont.)

So what’s the problem?  The CIA will only confirm that she was a CIA employee–a covert one at that–from January 2002 until outed in July 2003.  They won’t let her write about her experiences prior to January 2002.  But the CIA screwed up.  They’ve tried to argue that her life before January 2002 is a deep, dark secret.  Except the boneheads sent her an unclassified letter through snail mail detailing her years of previously classified service.  Once the toothpaste is squeezed out of the tube you don’t put it back in.

There also is a fairness issue.  Other CIA employees (e.g., Gary Schroen, Lindsay Moran, and Robert Baer) have published books with very few restrictions on what they could say about their previous secret lives.  Others, like Ty Drumheller and Gary Berntsen, faced more draconian reviews because their stories were unkind to the Bush Administration.  In fact, Berntsen was prevented from putting items into his book while the CIA gave Gary Schroen permission to publish the same items.  Ty Drumheller faced a similar issue on the CIA proscribing him from writing about Curveball while they gave George Tenet carte blanche in his book.

And in Valerie’s case it is even more ridiculous.  The story of the betrayal of her covert status is world news and anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the internet can find out in short order that she worked at CIA starting in September 1985.  But the CIA wants to pretend that is not the case.

Valerie, her publisher, and her attorneys tried to negotiate this matter in good faith.  Unfortunately there is no good faith from General Hayden.  The word I hear from former colleagues (not Valerie) is that Hayden has been told by the White House to keep the lid on Plame.  With this suit the lid is off and Val can fight back.  This is about fairness and right vs. wrong.  Many in the media have spent four years helping spread false stories about Valerie and her life at the CIA (e.g., “she was just a desk clerk”, “she was just an analyst”, “she wasn’t under cover”, etc.).  It is now time for Valerie to tell her side.  Hopefully this suit will lift the gag.

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SEE SusanHu’s diary for screen captures of the summons and complaint, and additional links.

READ ALL:  Download the complete Summons & Complaint filed today in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.

NEWS STORIES: Reuters story || New York Times story

Reuters: “NEW YORK (Reuters) – An ex-spy whose unmasking led to the conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aide is suing the Central Intelligence Agency, accusing it of unconstitutionally interfering with publication of her memoir.”

From the NYT story:  

Ms. Wilson’s suit said she worked with agency officials for 10 months to avoid disclosing national security information. But the agency’s refusal to allow her to include material already in the public domain, the suit said, violates her right to free speech.

This past Monday, I spent my day off from work trying to help my son salvage a project for his science class. I explained the course of events that led to this emergency data collection here and elsewhere. The basics–Son in Ohio is almost 14, has a diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, and is taking 8th grade science and math as a 7th grader. My husband, Demetrius was told on Friday that Son’s grade was in jeopardy because he didn’t have the data collected for a major project that was due this week. I put out an appeal for help, and the response was amazing. Son ended up with about 50 subjects for the study he was doing, when he was only trying for 32.  Since I asked for help publicly, it seemed right to offer a public update of how the project went.
I wish I had a happy ending to report, but at the moment there isn’t one. At least not for this project, but we continue to press forward in our efforts toward positive academic outcomes for our gifted, special needs son. We don’t expect the job to be easy, or to have any magical “happily ever afters”, but after all these years, it’s kind of disappointing that we still need to butt heads like this with people who are supposed to be helping.

From a very unhappy e-mail I received from Demetrius when I was at work on Tuesday:

Apparently, after (teacher) told us on Friday that (son) might be failing science and math, we were supposed to spend our weekend consoling him to that fact instead of trying to help him.  She keeps going on that (son) needs to take responsibility for his procrastinating.

Son’s grade may still be salvagable, but the bigger issue is that his teacher is still saying stuff like this. “He has to take responsibility”, he “has to learn” to do X, Y, or Z. Thank you for that headline from the esteemed research journal, Duh. Yes, of course he has to learn those things. When is someone going to start teaching him those things? Or even talking seriously with us about putting together a plan for how we are going to work together to teach him those skills?

I mean, what kind of social Darwinian attitude is it to say of an individual with any deficit, whether it be physical, cognitive, or emotional, “you’re just going to have to learn”? How about tossing a non-swimmer into the deep water, and then “helpfully” shouting “You’d better start swimming or you’ll drown!”

Shocking as it may seem, I really expect better than that from the people who are charged with providing my son with that Free Appropriate Public Education to which he is legally entitled.  I’m even so bold as to expect that his teachers remember that Asperger’s Syndrome is, by definition, a pervasive developmental disability–meaning that it affects many areas of his life. It’s not just a social deficit. Yes, my son is classified as gifted, but that pervasive disability of his still has a cognitive component. He has trouble with something called “executive function”, a set of skills involving

1. Working memory and recall (holding facts in mind while manipulating information; accessing facts stored in long-term memory.)
2. Activation, arousal, and effort (getting started; paying attention; finishing work)
3. Controlling emotions (ability to tolerate frustration; thinking before acting or speaking)
4. Internalizing language (using “self-talk” to control one’s behavior and direct future actions)
5. Taking an issue apart, analyzing the pieces, reconstituting and organizing it into new ideas (complex problem solving).

And since that is a deficit our son has, it’s something he needs help with. More effective help than urging him to “get organized” or “stop procrastinating”. As far as helpfulness goes, those suggestions are right up there with “You’d better start swimming or you’ll drown!”

The title of this diary should be the day’s first thought (well for me it will be second after “damn, my wife still has a great ass”) for all American citizens.  All of us who hop around the frog pond and read one another’s ideas and opinions know the reasons to impeach the current occupier of the Presidency: lying us into a war, incompetence and negligence in the failure to protect a major American city, advocating and carrying out torture, illegally and immorally detaining thousand of innocent people in Guantanamo, illegally outing a covert CIA operative, etc., etc. etc. ;The list is enormous.  

However, the most important impeachable offense is the illegal wiretapping of American citizens.  It is blatantly against the law.  No matter how much Bush wants American citizens to buy his bullshit that the law is what he says it is whether in chicken-shit- behind-the-back signing statements or just in executive pronouncements, the plain fact is that we have a Constitution and a set of laws and Bush is subject to those laws as are we all.  Impeaching Bush is simply holdling him accountable to the Constitution.  The question of whether there are any people in the House with the courage to follow the lead of Dennis Kucinich (I can’t believe I have no idea how to spell the name of a Presidential candidate) and pass Articles of Impeachment.

The editors of The Nation wrote an editorial called Sick Justice in the current issue.   The story of the sick AG courageously standing up to the carnivorous pair of Card and Gonzales, the so called ethical stands of Comey and Mueller and the revelation that Gonzales’s attempt to politicize the Justice Department, is a wonderful story but one which obscures as much as it illuminates.  

The frantic race to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft’s bedside on March 10, 2004, sounds more Hollywood than history: Acting AG James Comey’s foot-to-the-floor drive to head off then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card; FBI Director Robert Mueller’s startling imperative to his agents to defy any attempt by Gonzo and Card to throw Comey out; the sedated and badly ailing Ashcroft rousing himself from his sickbed to defend the Constitution; the resignation threats by Comey and Mueller. As Washington lore, the episode joins Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre and Thaddeus Stevens’s being carried on a stretcher to vote in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. And behind all this, the President pushing a wiretap program so blatantly illegal that his own top Justice appointees were threatening to resign.

The histrionics of that night, recounted by Comey to the Senate Judiciary Committee after three years, further erode Alberto Gonzales’s already fatally compromised capacity to run the Justice Department. And they expose an internal Administration conflict between hyper-politicized operatives like Card, Gonzales and Karl Rove and Justice professionals like Comey–Bush appointees who nonetheless understood that their oath was to the Constitution. But there is also a risk that the drama of this good guys/bad guys confrontation–with Comey protecting his boss the way Michael Corleone took it on the chin for the Don at that lonely, dark hospital in The Godfather–is obscuring the real story: just how many ways the Bush Administration was finding to break the law, and just how high the chain of complicity ran:

Just how criminal is the Bush Administration.  Well, it is at least this criminal.

1.  After senior Justice Department officials had reviewed Bush’s illegal wiretapping scheme and determined that it was a blatant violation of the surveillance law,

Card, Gonzales and Bush himself all indicated their intention to go forward anyhow.  In plain English, that is a conspiracy.

2.  For two years Bush endorsed secret NSA wiretaps without a warrant under FISA.

In other words, for two years the NSA and telephone companies had been commiting a federal crime with the full endorsement of the White House.

3.  The editors charge Bush with fraud.  According to Comey’s testimony

the President himself called the wife of the critically ill Ashcroft and asked her to let Gonzales and Card visit his bedside.  When they arrived they tried to persuade the sedated Ashcroft to approve the illegal taps.  But Ashcroft had already signed over his AG authority to Comey, who consequently carried carried the title Acting Attorney General

Why is the statement I highlighted important?  Because, according to Georgetown University law professor Marty Lederman, quoted by The Nation

this means that Bush, Gonzo, and Card were seeking the signature of Ashcroft, “who was not only incapacitated but not even acting in an official capacity.

This can only mean that Bush, Gonzales and Card had one purpose, what the editors call “a chilling motive:”   As Lederman puts it,

Obviously, they did so in order that they could present a fraudulent certification, of soneone who was not at the time acting as AG, to the NSA and/or to the telecom companies.”,/blockquote>
In other words, Bush tried to get the signature to authorize his wiretapping program from somone who was not authorized to give it.

All of this illuminates the length to which the current occupier of the White House will go to destroy traditional American freedom.  It’s time for him to leave, to not pass Go, to not kill one more American soldier or Marine, to leave so that we can begin to recover our moral standing in the world.  It’s time for George to clear brush.

I’m a father. I have a son and a daughter. Two days ago I read something that made me engage in an “unpleasant” thought experiment. I imagined that I and my son had been killed in an attack on our home. That my wife had lost her job. That she and my daughter had to flee the country due to death threats from the same men who had killed my son and I. That they had used all their money in order to bribe their way into Canada. That my wife’s cancer recurred and she couldn’t work. What would happen to my daughter, with no money, no food? What would she choose to do?

Sounds like a paranoid nightmare of epic proportions, doesn’t it? How could that happen to my family and my daughter, living as we do safely ensconced in American suburbia. And true, a scenario like the one I’ve just described isn’t likely to happen to my family.

But something like this nightmarish daydream of mine is happening to many Iraqis each day, and this is what Iraqi women who have fled their country are actually choosing to do to stay alive in Syria, even as I write these words:

MARABA, Syria — Back home in Iraq, Umm Hiba’s daughter was a devout schoolgirl, modest in her dress and serious about her studies. Hiba, who is now 16, wore the hijab, or Islamic head scarf, and rose early each day to say the dawn prayer before classes.

But that was before militias began threatening their Baghdad neighborhood and Umm Hiba and her daughter fled to Syria last spring. There were no jobs, and Umm Hiba’s elderly father developed complications related to his diabetes.

Desperate, Umm Hiba followed the advice of an Iraqi acquaintance and took her daughter to work at a nightclub along a highway known for prostitution. “We Iraqis used to be a proud people,” she said over the frantic blare of the club’s speakers. She pointed out her daughter, dancing among about two dozen other girls on the stage, wearing a pink silk dress with spaghetti straps, her frail shoulders bathed in colored light.

As Umm Hiba watched, a middle-aged man climbed onto the platform and began to dance jerkily, arms flailing, among the girls. […]

For anyone living in Damascus these days, the fact that some Iraqi refugees are selling sex or working in sex clubs is difficult to ignore.

Even in central Damascus, men freely talk of being approached by pimps trawling for customers outside juice shops and shawarma sandwich stalls, and of women walking up to passing men, an act unthinkable in Arab culture, and asking in Iraqi-accented Arabic if the men would like to “have a cup of tea.”

What if this atrocity was happening to our neighbors, friends and families? What if our daughters and sisters were being forced into prostitution in order to earn enough money to stay alive. Would we care about a story like this then?

Yet, we still have politicians in Washington like Senator Joe Lieberman standing heavily guarded by American soldiers in a Baghdad market, wearing a helmet and a flak jacket, and then proclaiming that the lives of ordinary Iraqis are so much better now that we have invaded and occupied their country, trained members of one religious sect to act as death squads to slaughter the members of another religious sect, and spent billions of dollars on reconstruction projects that never get completed, and large American military bases that do.

(cont.)
Dear Senator Lieberman, answer me this: If life is so much better in Iraq, if we truly are making progress, why have over two million people fled for their lives to neighboring countries? And why are Iraqi women, and yes, adolescent girls, selling their bodies to Syrian men because it is the only way they have to feed their families? Why?

Silence, of course, is the only answer we will ever get to such questions from honorable, strong, and eminent statesmen like Senator Lieberman. But I wonder if the good Senator would take the time to imagine such a possibility happening to his family. I know his wife is the daughter of holocaust survivors, so I suspect it wouldn’t be as much of an intellectual exercise for him as it probably was for me, after I read this report in the New York Times two days ago.

Afterward, would he be willing answer my questions then? Would he still say the lives of young women, like 16 year old Hiba and her mother, are better off because of our occupation of her country? I can’t tell you what his answer might be, but I can tell you how this story made me feel after I read it. Sick. Sick to the point of nausea.

But then, I’m not a powerful United States Senator whose moral courage is praised so often by our news media, nor am I an expert on the War on Terror, or gifted with the foreknowledge of what would happen to our nation if we ever withdrew our troops from Iraq.

I’m only a blogger. And the father of a young adolescent girl. Whom I love very, very much.

As I’m sure Ulm Hiba loves her daughter, too.

Iraq

Iraq Refugees

Iraq Refugee Crisis

Syria

Sex Trade

Joe Lieberman

This would probably had gone in the News Bucket, if we had one today. But I have not seen it blogged anywhere – so let’s put it out there.

I caught this headline in The Guardian this morning:

Want peace? Then live in Scandinavia, says study

Scandinavian countries are the most peaceful in the world, and Iraq the most dangerous and violent, according to a new international league table published yesterday. The UK is listed 49th of the 121 countries surveyed, with the United States at 96. The Global Peace Index uses 24 different factors to assess a country’s level of violence and danger.

Below::
I looked around a bit, and found a few more articles and commentary.  Also the source – Global Peace Index

The Global Peace Index has been developed in conjunction with:

    * The Economist Intelligence Unit
    * an international panel of peace experts from Peace Institutes and Think Tanks
    * the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Sydney, Australia

[on the ‘About’ page]

From The Guardian yesterday:

Norway comes top of the table with its near neighbours Denmark, Sweden and Finland all listed in the top seven. New Zealand is second and Ireland fourth, one place above Japan.

…

The Economist Intelligence Unit compiled the index on behalf of the Australian IT entrepreneur and philanthropist, Steve Killelea, who said he hoped it would encourage nations to address the issue of peace. It has the support of the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the former US president Jimmy Carter.

The survey found that “small, stable countries which are part of regional blocs, such as the European Union, are most likely to get a higher ranking”. The main determinants of internal peace were income, extent of schooling and the level of regional integration.

Another commentary:

After compiling the Index, the researchers examined it for patterns in
order to identify the “drivers” that make for peaceful societies. They
found that peaceful countries often shared high levels of democracy and
transparency of government, education and material well-being. While the
U.S. possesses many of these characteristics, its ranking was brought down
by its engagement in warfare and external conflict, as well as high levels
of incarceration and homicide. The U.S.’s rank also suffered due to the
large share of military expenditure from its GDP, attributed to its status
as one of the world’s military-diplomatic powers.
    The main findings of the Global Peace Index are:

    — Peace is correlated to indicators such as income, schooling and the
       level of regional integration
    — Peaceful countries often shared high levels of transparency of
       government and low corruption
    — Small, stable countries which are part of regional blocs are most
       likely to get a higher ranking

Is there something inherent to large, populous nations that prevents them from being peaceful?

There are only two nations with a population of 50 million+ (somewhat arbitrary definition of populous) among the top 20; Japan and Germany.  Both are nations with policies (imposed and self-imposed) since WWII intended to reduce/prevent the potential for conflict.  

Remember, you can say almost anything, but never ask Cui Bono?

Leading neoconservative Norman Podhoretz wants George W. Bush to bomb Iran.  In a May 30 Wall Street Journal, he writes “I hope and pray that President Bush will do it.”

Podhoretz sees the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan as “theaters that have been opened up in the early stages of a protracted global struggle,” and sees Iran as another front in what he describes as “World War IV.”  And to throw in the standard dose of fear factor to support his arguments, he compares today’s Iran to Nazi Germany in 1938.

A Hatful of Hitlers

We had one Hitler in the 20th century.  In this century, to hear the likes of Podhoretz tell it, we’ve already had three of them.  Osama bin Laden became the new Hitler after 9/11.  Saddam Hussein took the Hitler mantle during the propaganda campaign that led to the Iraq invasion.  Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad turned into Hitler right about the time the Bush administration figured that, oops, we’ve hosed up this Iraq thing, time to start making Americans afraid of somebody else.

The anti-Semitic angle aside, what makes Hitler such a convenient boogey man to compare Middle East bad guys too is the 1938 Munich Agreement, which gave the Sudetenland to Germany to satisfy Hitler’s desire for Lebensraum (living space).  Many credit this appeasement as having emboldened Hitler to invade Poland and France a year later.  Podhoretz and others argue that if we appease rather than attack Iran, we’ll embolden that country to undertake further aggressive actions.  

This Germany/Iran analogy is bunker mentality bunk for several reasons.

First, Ahmadinejad doesn’t hold the kind of absolute power that Hitler had in Nazi Germany.  Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i holds the real power in Iran, and unlike Hitler, he has a track record of behaving like a rational actor.  

Next, the balance of military power today looks nothing like it did in 1938.  Then, Hitler had the most modern and mobile military in Europe.  Having invested its military capital in a static defense system of fortifications–the Maginot Line–France was incapable of running Hitler out of the Sudetenland, and Britain’s only realistic way to access the continent was to come through France.  The only way France or Britain could engage Hitler on the continent was for Hitler to invade France, and we all know how things went for France and Britain when he finally did.

Today, the U.S. spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined.  Even though it has a pesky coastal navy, Iran’s military is a comparative flyspeck.  It cannot project power much beyond its borders or the Persian Gulf, and if it ever came down to a no-holds barred showdown between them and us, they would lose large.  It is ludicrous to characterize a sole superpower’s decision to talk to a minor power rather than to attack it as “appeasement.”

MAD vs. SAD

Iran has consistently claimed that it has no ambitions to produce nuclear weapons, and despite concerted efforts by Dick Cheney and others, no one has been able to prove Iran’s claim to be false.  But if Iran gets itself a fistful of nukes, Podhoretz says, the Mutually Assured Destruction deterrence of the Cold War won’t work.  To back up this assertion, he quotes noted Islamic world expert Bernard Lewis:

MAD, mutual assured destruction, [was effective] right through the cold war. Both sides had nuclear weapons. Neither side used them, because both sides knew the other would retaliate in kind. This will not work with a religious fanatic [like Ahmadinejad]. For him, mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We know already that [Iran’s leaders] do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers. We have seen it again and again. In the final scenario, and this applies all the more strongly if they kill large numbers of their own people, they are doing them a favor. They are giving them a quick free pass to heaven and all its delights.

I won’t pretend to have Lewis’s background and experience when it comes to understanding the Islamic mind, but it sounds like Lewis is losing his, and I’m not alone in coming to that conclusion.  Of Lewis’s 2002 book What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, Juan Cole wrote: “How a profoundly learned and highly respected historian, whose career spans some sixty years, could produce such a hodgepodge of muddled thinking, inaccurate assertions and one-sided punditry is a profound mystery.”

For Iran to use nukes, either directly or through a proxy terrorist group wouldn’t be a case of mutually assured destruction.  It would be self-assured destruction.  Iran couldn’t possibly do as much damage to the U.S. or its allies as the U.S. and its allies could do to Iran.  I question Lewis’s assertion that Iran’s leaders “do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers,” but I completely reject the notion that Iran would risk a successful nuclear attack or New York or Chicago at the price of losing all of its people, all of its cities, all of its industries and all of its culture.  

Islamofabulism

Podhoretz describes Iran as the “main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11.”  He also says that Iran is “the main sponsor of the terrorism that is Islamofascism’s weapon of choice.”

The neoconservative propaganda campaign to subliminally connect Iran with 9/11 is fairly new, and is no more substantiated than earlier claims of a connection between Iraq and 9/11.  Calling Iran the “main sponsor of terrorism” conveniently ignores the fact that most of the 9/11 attackers were Sunni Arabs from Saudi Arabia, not Shiite Persians from Iran.  It also stiff-arms the reality that al Qaeda, supposedly the biggest bad guys in our war on terror, are still comfy-cozy in their feathered nests in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Podhoretz also says that Ahmadinejad “wishes to dominate the greater Middle East, and thereby to control the oilfields of the region and the flow of oil out of it through the Persian Gulf.”

Well, Ahmadinejad may wish to control the Middle East, but making that wish come true will take a heck of a lot more than blowing out candles on his birthday cake.  The notion that the non-head of a Persian Shiite state can “dominate” the largely Arab Sunni Middle East defies the laws of probability.  Liberal Buddhist Dennis Kucinich has a better chance of becoming president of the United States.  

Iran is most certainly an emerging regional power that we must learn to deal with, but not in the way Podhoretz wants us to.  The best move we could make would be to become Iran’s big energy partner, elbowing China and Russia out of the picture.  

But that would require real diplomacy, which means it won’t happen on Bush’s watch.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his commentaries at Pen and Sword.

George Will- idiot:

Conservatism’s recovery of its intellectual equilibrium requires a confident explanation of why America has two parties and why the conservative one is preferable. Today’s political argument involves perennial themes that give it more seriousness than many participants understand. The argument, like Western political philosophy generally, is about the meaning of, and the proper adjustment of the tension between, two important political goals — freedom and equality.

Today conservatives tend to favor freedom, and consequently are inclined to be somewhat sanguine about inequalities of outcomes. Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome.

Today conservatives tend not to favor freedom. They favor illegal warrantless wiretaps, FBI National Security letters, the suspension of habeas corpus, kangaroo courts, torture facilities, voter suppression, limitations on free speech, abuse of eminent domain, restrictions on women’s health alternatives, restrictions on permissible scientific enquiry, government intrusion into personal medical decisions, mandatory sentencing, the war on drugs, de facto conscription thru stop-loss programs, and more.

Liberals oppose almost all of this. What George Will is missing is that the conservatives turned out to be frauds.