Bruce Bartlett reports that David Malpass is "exploring" a Senate run in New York, presumably as a Republican. Malpass is an unusual character, a die-hard supply-sider and an economic forecaster. Like most economic forecasters, Malpass is wrong a great deal of the time, though particular brand of his wrongness tends to correspond to the Republican Party agenda in general and the status of upper-bracket tax levels in particular.
There were moments--long moments--during the Iraq war when I had my doubts. Even deep doubts. Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture like this in the Arab world turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.
Of course, Iraq hasn’t turned out that well. Sunni jihadniks are still routinely murdering pious Shi’a on pilgrimage to Karbala. Still...
It's repeat winner Pete Wehner! I assure you that the staff of Jonathan Chait is scouring the internet daily for non-Wehner applicants. But nobody seems to be able to compete with the master himself, who writes today:
Yes, I suppose we are in no position to abandon Yemen, although, frankly, I hardly knew we were really there. Well, we are, as I pointed out in my Abdulmutallab posting on New Year's Day. But imagine how Senators Levin and Leahy would have reacted if poor George Bush had stumbled into the sands of "the empty quarter" without so much as advice, let alone consent. Maybe they were informed.
Jews usually go out to the movies on Christmas ... and then they go out to eat "Chinese." I've spent it writing. Below is my harvest. I wish you all good cheer.
Here are the motifs of my writing day. Alas, none of them cheery.
1. THE REAL GRIM REAPER: HOLY DAY VICTIMS IN IRAQ AND PAKISTAN
2. COLD COMMON SENSE ABOUT IRAN FROM, MIRABILI DICTU, "THE NEW YORK TIMES"
3. A WISE EUROPEAN FOREIGN MINISTER: "WE SHOULD SHUT UP ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST"
4. A SOBER "TIMES" PIECE ON ISRAELI MILITARY DOCTRINE
5. THE SON OF THE MAN WHO WAS KILLED BY TERRORISTS IN THE WEST BANK: "REVENGE IS NOT FOR JEWS"
6. THE PRESIDENT AND ONE DUMB JEWISH WOMAN, THE ANTI-ANTI-SEMITISM CZARINA IN WASHINGTON
7. COPENHAGEN AND THE UNSEATING OF AMERICA AS A GREAT POWER
8. THE CHRISTMAS TERRORIST
So here goes:
1. THE REAL GRIM REAPER: HOLY DAY VICTIMS IN IRAQ AND PAKISTAN
I know this is the president's ambition. But the thought that he has already forged it is pretension of the highest order. In fact, it can be his ambition only if he believes the task is, in some actual sense, easy and actually doable. He capsulizes this in his address at West Point thus: "a new beginning ... that recognizes our mutual interest in breaking a cycle of conflict, and that promises a future in which those who kill innocents are isolated by those who stand up for peace and prosperity and human dignity." Yes, indeed, yes, we can.
The Places In Between was my introduction to Afghanistan. Published in 2006, it was written by Rory Stewart, who at age 36 has already lived a life at once so adventurous and so quirky to defy easy narrative. He will soon take a safe (Tory) seat in the British parliament and rise quickly in the ranks, so quickly that he will still be thought young when he ascends to 10 Downing Street. Why not? (Rory is the second of my friends who is thought to be the future prime minister of an American ally, the first being Michael Ignatieff, Liberal Party aspirant in Ottawa.
Listening to Barack Obama explain his new strategy for Afghanistan tonight, you may have been struck by a sense of deja vu. Before a sea of somber West Point cadets, Obama invoked the grim memory of the September 11 attacks. He vowed that the days of “blank check" policymaking are over. He called al Qaeda a “cancer” that threatens the region and said he would not allow the group a safe haven there. He insisted that the U.S. would get tougher about corruption within the Karzai government and would extend a hand to low-level Taliban fighters willing to switch sides. He pledged to accelerate training of Afghan security forces and explained that doing so will allow our troops to return home.
If these points sounded familiar, it’s because Obama has made them all before. Go back and read the president’s March 27 speech explaining his first troop increase for Afghanistan; tonight’s speech often reads like a lightly rewritten version of that one, this time with 30,000 new troops substituted for 17,000, and new specifics about a date for beginning a U.S. withdrawal (namely, June of 2011).
This is not a complaint about self-plagiarism. It’s a compliment for Obama’s consistency and intellectual honesty. Back in March, Obama described his vision as “a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” That vision implied a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan—one which the Pentagon properly understood to require tens of thousands of more troops to implement. For a time this fall, White House officials fretted that General Stanley McChrystal’s troop request had given them a “sticker shock” which required a re-review of their strategy. But no one who understood the war, no one as smart as Obama, should have been surprised by McChrystal’s troop request.
Which is why it made sense for Obama’s speech tonight to reiterate his March vision. Sure, he could have cited declining political support for the war, and the fraud-tainted election of Hamid Karzai, and the still-precarious U.S. economy as reasons for changing his mind. It would have been hard to blame him. But Obama’s reiteration of his main talking points from March indicates that he believed what he was saying at the time and simply hasn’t seen anything dramatic enough in the past six months to change his mind.
Barack Obama's aides can pat themselves on the back today; they have succeeded in spinning the president's new troop surge as a simultaneous plan for leaving Afghanistan. And I can see honest logic there: By delivering a hard punch to the Taliban, you hope to create conditions that allow even flawed Afghan security forces to get on their feet, which may then allow for a quicker U.S. exit. But that's been the plan in Iraq for about six years and we've still barely drawn down from that morass.
I have essential confidence in the domestic policy of this administration. Its economic advisers basically share the values of pragmatic liberalism, which means they aim for more equality rather than less. This comports with Obama's values. But he is smart enough to grasp that, on these matters, feelings do not equate with practical knowledge. So it is the appointees are who making the working decisions on TARP, on loan and mortgage policy, etc.
I used to be the foreign editor of In These Times in Chicago. I didn’t particularly enjoy the job, because I have never been fascinated with the world outside of the United States. I am not sure whether I could find Honduras or Liberia on a map, and I have never mastered the current spelling of Chinese names.
The defense ministers of our NATO allies met last week in Slovakia--a place where NATO power has much recent neighborly resonance--and among the gathering was also Robert Gates. His position on Afghanistan is not quite clear, poised as he is between his president and his men. Of course, Obama has more power. And his men are not really his in the sense that his career, even while in the military, was with intelligence operations and not the military.
Now, having already chastised General Stanley McChrystal for embarrassing him and his boss, Gates did not especially need his civilian colleagues, to a person, in the Western defense apparatus to join together and press for "more" rather than "less" in Afghanistan. It is something that wouldn't have occurred had George Bush still been president, whatever position he actually held on additional men, women and materiel to the AfPak battle theatre.
In any case, what is clear is that the alliance does not want to be dragged into a military commitment. Afghanistan is its military commitment, and strongly so. It has acted to influence Obama in actually fulfilling his commitment made to American voters last year and it is trying to prevent him from backtracking or sidetracking. This is, moreover, not just a rhetorical move: it comes with the promise of personnel, the most precious promise of all.
I confess to reading people on the right. Sometimes with utter dismay. Oftentimes with respect. Among the people I read regularly is Peter Wehner who actually writes for Commentary's website, Contentious, with other conservative intellectuals. And very contentious they are. Wehner actually was one of George Bush's speechwriters. Since I thought some of Bush's speeches quite alright--and even better--this fact is not a disqualifier.
Indeed, Wehner is one smart guy ... and a stylish writer besides. What's more, he knows his history. Today, he's dug into the history of the Cold War, an era not so strategically remote from our own. Except that the enemy is militarily far weaker than we are but stronger in the fact that it hides behind civilians--committed to it and utterly indifferent to it--which, given our scruples, provides enormous advantages to our foe.
This is the circumstance that permits the Goldstone panel, installed by the oh, so impartial Human Rights Council, to accuse Israel of war crimes. Moreover, it is the setting for charging the United States and NATO in Afghanistan also with war crimes.
WaPo:
Meanwhile, McChrystal has finished drawing up his request for what is expected to be thousands or tens of thousands of additional trainers and combat troops for Afghanistan, but he is awaiting instructions before submitting the request to the Pentagon.
Senior defense officials said that, in effect, McChrystal has been asked to delay submitting the request.
Let's face it: Moammar Gadhafi has outsmarted the Western powers, and he has been outsmarting them for exactly forty years. Not outsmarting them, by the way, in behalf of an ideology either collectivist or Islamist—although it aspires to leadership in both orbits. Libya's rise this coming year to the presidency of the United Nations General Assembly is a symbolic victory for the mangy man and his very wealthy country with deprived people.
This is a case of kingship with populist and Arabist rhetoric. But what it really is is gangster politics with ideological pretenses that justify keeping independent spirits in prison.
In 2004, while Iraq was both exploding and imploding, George Bush, desperate to show that he had won some Arabs over to "our side," made a deal with Gadhafi: Tripoli would give up its quest for atomic weapons, a quest that its science (unlike Iran's) could not support, and the U.S. and other Western powers would welcome the madman back into civilized society. It worked, more or less, for Gadhafi. It did not work for us.
As for the most important domestic matters—matters that affect our long-time strength in international and military affairs—I believe he has been both brave and wise. And his advisers on these economic issues are not, like George Bush's were, people whose reputations were made making big money. Yes, making money in and from the very ways that brought on the country's financial near-fatal collapse. The people who have suffered the most from this are the poor and the middle classes. Look at every index. Or just look around you at the empty stores and shop windows.
I went to a "prime outlet" mall the other day. The prices were down, roughly 70 percent in every outlet, but there were no customers, in some locales literally no customers. What was full was the food court, full with families of four or five trying to eke out a meal at less than $2 per. Very healthy. This is President Bush's legacy.
I've got my quarrels with the president. They are mostly around foreign policy. And, no, not just about Israel.
As for the most important domestic matters—matters that affect our long-time strength in international and military affairs—I believe he has been both brave and wise. And his advisers on these economic issues are not, like George Bush's were, people whose reputations were made making big money. Yes, making money in and from the very ways that brought on the country's financial near-fatal collapse. The people who have suffered the most from this are the poor and the middle classes. Look at every index. Or just look around you at the empty stores and shop windows.
I went to a "prime outlet" mall the other day. The prices were down, roughly 70 percent in every outlet, but there were no customers, in some locales literally no customers. What was full was the food court, full with families of four or five trying to eke out a meal at less than $2 per. Very healthy. This is President Bush's legacy.
Maybe not a shocker but on Fox yesterday the vice president gave the clearest affirmation yet of the idea that he pressed George Bush for military action to halt Iran's nuclear program.
The past few years haven't been kind to foreign policy idealism--the belief that when authoritarian states mistreat their own people, it is a matter of concern for all of us. We idealists can largely blame ourselves for this.
