Best of the Web Today - June 29, 2005
By JAMES TARANTO
Staying the Course
In his speech at Fort Bragg, N.C., President Bush answered the criticisms from both the cut-and-run left and the send-more-troops right:
I recognize that Americans want our troops to come home as quickly as possible. So do I. Some contend that we should set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. forces. Let me explain why that would be a serious mistake. Setting an artificial timetable would send the wrong message to the Iraqis, who need to know that America will not leave before the job is done. It would send the wrong message to our troops, who need to know that we are serious about completing the mission they are risking their lives to achieve. And it would send the wrong message to the enemy, who would know that all they have to do is to wait us out. We will stay in Iraq as long as we are needed, and not a day longer.
Some Americans ask me, if completing the mission is so important, why don't you send more troops? If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job. Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever, when we are, in fact, working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave.
But one thing about the speech bothered us. Bush correctly noted that the enemy in Iraq is not only an indigenous "insurgency": "Our military reports that we have killed or captured hundreds of foreign fighters in Iraq who have come from Saudi Arabia and Syria, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and others." This got us to thinking of something the president said on Sept. 20, 2001:
We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.
Is the president confident that the foreign terrorists in Iraq are acting independently of any state, that none of the regimes in the six nations he cited are providing "aid or safe haven to terrorism"? If he is not, shouldn't he have threatened those regimes with some sort of consequences?
The Dems' Response: Forget About 9/11
The New York Times answers President Bush's speech with a plaintive appeal to the Angry Left (emphasis ours):
No one wants a disaster in Iraq, and Mr. Bush's critics can put aside, at least temporarily, their anger at the administration for its hubris, its terrible planning and its inept conduct of the war in return for a frank discussion of where to go from here.
The claim that "no one wants a disaster in Iraq" strikes us as either naive or disingenuous. Reading the postspeech commentary on TPMCafe.com, where a thousand Josh Marshalls bloom, we were struck by the utter lack of constructive criticism. Here's a sampling (emphasis in original):
Evasions of responsibility, false analogies, refusals to correct course, and cheap acts of demagoguery . . . an insult to the American people . . . We've at least become sophisticates of our own bamboozlement. . . . He hopes to pull off the trick of repeating the word "terrorist" so often that he can recreate the blur he induced in 2002-03, the same blur that he summoned back for the 2004 election--all of them, the terrorists, are the same. . . . I didn't hear the words "weapons of mass destruction," did you?
These aren't Noam Chomsky-type America-haters but partisan Democrats who describe their own political orientation as center-left. All they have to say is that they really, really can't stand the president. The Washington Post quotes various Democratic officeholders, who likewise have nothing constructive to say:
After the speech, Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) issued a biting statement saying that Bush's "numerous references to September 11th did not provide a way forward in Iraq" but instead "served to remind the American people that our most dangerous enemy, namely Osama bin Laden, is still on the loose." . . .
Even before the speech, other leading Democrats called Bush's vision out of touch with reality. Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the party's 2004 presidential nominee, said in a floor speech: "When the vice president absurdly claims the insurgency is 'in its last throes,' he insults the common sense and intelligence of the American people, and diminishes our stature in the world."
The liberal group MoveOn.org, meanwhile, announced that it is spending $500,000 on a television and newspaper advertising campaign featuring remarks critical of Bush's Iraq policy made by Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), quoting him saying, "The White House is completely disconnected from reality. . . . It's like they're just making it up as they go along."
Reid, Kerry and Hagel, by the way, all voted in favor of liberating Iraq. As for MoveOn.org, a consistent opponent, declared in an e-mail yesterday: "Bush's speech tonight will be one of the major 'tipping point' moments since the war began, and we can help make sure that no one buys his 'stay the course' rhetoric."
It seems clear that for a combination of ideological, political and emotional reasons, many Democrats are indeed hoping for disaster in Iraq. In fact, a report in The Hill newspaper describes at least one who seems to be openly hoping for another attack on America:
[Joe] Biden's greatest strength, his supporters say, is his foreign-policy expertise. He is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has served as its chairman.
"We're probably one terrorist act away from the Democrats' really focusing on a candidate who has unquestioned credentials on national security and terrorism," said David Wilhelm, who served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee during the 1994 election cycle and is an informal adviser to Biden. "Senator Biden brings that to the table. He is the go-to person in the Democratic Party on those issues."
Much of the criticism of the president's speech from the left has amounted to, as blogger Edward Morrissey puts it, "screaming every time 9/11 gets mentioned in connection with fighting terrorists." Even the Times, though straining to sound half reasonable, says that "we had hoped [Bush] would resist the temptation to raise the bloody flag of 9/11 over and over again to justify a war in a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks." Isn't this further evidence that Karl Rove got it exactly right?
But of course the liberation of Iraq had everything to do with 9/11. As Bush said last night:
The terrorists can kill the innocent, but they cannot stop the advance of freedom. The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lessons of September the 11th, if we abandon the Iraqi people to men like [Abu Musab al] Zarqawi, and if we yield the future of the Middle East to men like Bin Laden. For the sake of our nation's security, this will not happen on my watch.
Or, as Andrew Sullivan put it in March 2003:
Rather than simply forestall crises, postpone them, avoid them or fob them off onto others, Bush is actually doing the hard thing. He's calling for real democracy in the Middle East. He's aiming to make the long-standing U.S. policy of regime change in Iraq a reality. He actually wants to defeat Islamist terrorism, rather than make excuses for tolerating its cancerous growth.
The counterargument is that 9/11 was just a one-off, justifying maybe the liberation of Afghanistan (though the liberal left is not united even behind this proposition), but nothing more. In the case of Iraq, the idea seems to be that because Saddam Hussein did not personally fly the planes into the World Trade Center, he and Zarqawi should be free to kill as many Iraqis as they please.
Even if there was a reasonable argument against liberating Iraq, that debate was settled when Congress voted, overwhelmingly and with bipartisan support, to authorize the war in October 2002. The Democrats today seem more interested in angling for political advantage and rehashing old complaints than in winning the war in which the country is now engaged. This is not the sign of a serious political party.
His Bawl Is Worse Than His Bite
The Washington Post reports on an effort to speed up the process of granting federal security clearances:
The process for vetting government employees and contract workers was designated a "high risk" area in January by the Government Accountability Office, which monitors federal programs for Congress.
Yesterday, Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) said terrorism and intelligence programs suffer when federal job applicants and contractors are left "in a state of limbo" for a year or more waiting for security clearances.
Voinovich, who called a hearing on clearances as chairman of the Senate subcommittee on government management and the federal workforce, told Bush administration officials: "I am going to be on this like a junkyard dog. We are going to get this off the high-risk list. Does everyone understand me?"
For an artist's rendering of Voinovich as a junkyard dog, click here.
The 'Pro-Americans'
Recently the Pew Global Attitudes Project released another of its international polls finding that, ho-hum, a lot of foreigners don't like America. But columnist Anne Applebaum has an interesting take on it. Noting that a significant minority in many countries--"some 43 percent of the French, 41 percent of Germans, 42 percent of Chinese and 42 percent of Lebanese"--are pro-American, she looks at the demographics of this group:
Advertising executives understand very well the phenomenon of ordinary women who read magazines filled with photographs of clothes they could never afford: They call such women "aspirational." Looking around the world, it is clear there are classes of people who might also be called aspirational. They are upwardly mobile, or would like to be. They tend to be pro-American, too.
In Britain, for example, 57.6 percent of those whose income are low believe that the United States has a mainly positive influence in the world, while only 37.1 percent of those whose income are high believe the same. Breaking down the answers by education, a similar pattern emerges. In South Korea, 69.2 percent of those with low education think the United States is a positive influence, while only 45.8 percent of those with a high education agree. That trend repeats itself not only across Europe but in many other developed countries. Those on their way up are pro-American. Those who have arrived, and perhaps feel threatened by those eager to do the same, are much less so.
In developing countries, by contrast, the pattern is sometimes reversed. It turns out, for example, that Indians are much more likely to be pro-American if they are not only younger but also wealthier and better educated, and no wonder. . . . Some 69 percent of Indians with high incomes think the United States is a mainly positive influence in the world, and only 29 percent of those with low incomes agree. This same phenomenon may also account for the persistence of a surprising degree of popular pro-Americanism in such places as Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil and the Philippines. They're getting wealthier--like Americans--but aren't yet so rich as to feel directly competitive.
There may be domestic parallels here. The most anti-American Americans seem to come from the ranks of the superrich and the overeducated. And "working class" support for the relatively free-market Republicans, which so mystifies liberal Democrats, is at least in part aspirational.
Gitmo Flip-Flop
A Muslim cleric formerly held at Guantanamo Bay prison said Tuesday that U.S. guards there regularly desecrated the Quran by putting it into a toilet," the Associated Press reports. But Airat Vakhitov acknowledges that "he never witnessed it himself":
"A Palestinian named Mahir, who was in a neighboring cell, had seen it and told me about that," Vakhitov told the AP. "Many other people in Guantanamo also told me about that."
Sure thing there, Airat. Just one problem: As blogger Danny Troy points out, "Vakhitov was singing a different tune not too long ago." Troy quotes from an August 2003 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty report:
Hasanova [Vakhitov's mother] said she learned of his fate after receiving a letter from him last November. She said her son is feeling well and is satisfied with the conditions of his detention at Guantanamo.
"He writes that he is treated kindly and with respect, that he has good food, cleanliness, and as he says in his letter, he feels better than if he was at the best Russian sanatoriums," Hasanova said.
Vakhitov's mother said he also writes that his fellow detainees are friendly toward him, and that they often lend each other copies of the Koran and pray together.
What accounts for the discrepancy? Well, the AP dispatch notes, at the very end, this U.S. response:
A statement from Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Flex Plexico also did not address Vakhitov's specific allegations but said "it is important to note that al-Qaida training manuals emphasize the tactic of making false abuse allegations."
Indeed. Shouldn't news organizations make that point in the first or second paragraph of every story about an erstwhile detainee's charges of "abuse"?
These Balloons Won't Float
Thanks to a Reuters report, we now know four men who won't be appointed to the Supreme Court anytime soon:
U.S. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid suggested on Tuesday that four of his Republican colleagues be considered by President Bush if a vacancy occurs on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Seeking a possible consensus nominee, Reid recommended Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Mel Martinez of Florida, Mike DeWine of Ohio and Mike Crapo of Idaho.
Asked about Texas' John Cornyn, who's actually served on his state's supreme court, Reid "shrugged and said, 'I've told you (the ones) I think he should consider.' " We guess Alabama's Jeff Sessions wouldn't make Reid happy either.
Bad News for Men's Fashions
"Italian, Israeli Defense Ministers Pledge Wider Ties"--headline, DefenseNews.com, June 28
Why Were They Debating Spurs Anyway?
"Pit Bull Attacks Spur Debate"--headline, San Jose Mercury News, June 28
You Don't Say
"Heart Attacks Can Quicken Death"--headline, Detroit News, June 29
To Get a Zero, Cite Its Reciprocal
"As newly minted report cards hang on refrigerator doors, more students in Norfolk and Virginia Beach are celebrating victory over the law of averages," reports the Virginian-Pilot:
That's because the chance of earning a zero in some classrooms has become nil, nada, zip, zilch, none.
Some teachers, aware of the devastating effects that one zero can have on a student's final grade and recognizing the string of perfect scores necessary to negate it, have simply stopped logging zeros. Instead, at some schools, the lowest score students can receive is as high as 50 or 60--even if they don't turn in assignments.
In California, however, one student succeeded in failing, reports the Victorville Daily Press:
For using the "G" word 41 times in a term paper, Bethany Hauf was given an "F" by her Victor Valley Community College instructor.
Hauf's teacher approved her term paper topic--Religion and its Place within the Government--on one condition: Don't use the word God. Instead of complying with VVCC adjunct instructor Michael Shefchik's condition Hauf wrote a 10-page report for her English 101 class entitled "In God We Trust."
Represented by the American Center for Law and Justice, a Christian counterpart to the ACLU, Hauf is threatening legal action. Actually, Shefchik's condition was a bit unclear:
Hauf first approached her teacher about writing her paper in an April 12 e-mail. . . . Shefchik wrote her back an e-mail approving her topic choice, but at the same time cautioning her to be objective in her reporting. "I have one limiting factor," Shefchik wrote, according to the ACLJ. "No mention of big 'G' gods, i.e., one, true god argumentation."
Although she got a failing grade on this paper, she got a "C" in the class, proving she's at least as smart as John Kerry. |
