The Discerning Texan

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote in favor of ratifying the Law of the Sea Treaty is disappointing, but grassroots opposition is still building against the treaty. The strong statements against LOST in recent days by the Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and Mike Huckabee campaigns are an indication that their campaigns have already felt this movement against the treaty. The opposition of the Senate’s Republican leadership is another good indication. If Majority Leader Harry Reid brings LOST to the floor for a vote, it is going to be a real fight.

For those not up-to-speed on the issue, here are the main points to remember about LOST:

1. LOST threatens U. S. sovereignty. Not just a little or around the edges, but fundamentally. Once the U. S. became a party to the treaty, any number of issues could be adjudicated by a LOST tribunal. It is not clear what the limits are on the issues that could be taken up by LOST. Jurisdiction over anything that affects the oceans directly or indirectly could be asserted. The majority of members of the tribunal adjudicating any particular issue are almost certainly going to be hostile to U. S. interests. Tribunal decisions cannot be appealed. Unlike every other country in the world, those decisions could be enforced in U. S. federal courts against the federal government.

2. LOST would be a big step toward United Nations global governance. The treaty’s reach extends far beyond international issues and disagreements into nations’ internal policies on a wide array of issues. The treaty’s structure is designed to replace national decision making with UN decision making on these issues.

3. For the first time, the United Nations would have international taxing authority through LOST. Enough said.

4. LOST would accomplish backdoor implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and far beyond. A claim before a LOST tribunal that industrial CO2 emissions are leading to increasing acidification of the oceans and thereby threatening the world’s marine ecological resources would almost certainly be decided in the affirmative. Other nations could decide how to respond to such a decision. In the U. S., a private party, such as an environmental pressure group, could file suit in federal court to force the federal government to implement the tribunal’s decision. This is because in the U. S., ratified treaties have the same status as the Constitution. This is not true of any other country.

More on LOST here.

China's worst fuel crisis in two years spread to the capital and other inland areas by Wednesday, and one man was killed in a brawl at a petrol station queue, upping pressure on the government to intervene.

Diesel shortages in China's political heart, which escaped previous supply crunches unscathed, highlight tensions between the government and its increasingly independent oil firms about who should pay for the country's generous fuel subsidies.

Top refiner Sinopec on Wednesday pledged more supplies and bought additional diesel fuel abroad, but it may fall to Beijing to end the stand-off by raising domestic prices, easing taxes, promising another year-end pay-off -- or simply strong-arming suppliers into selling more fuel at a loss. ...

Obama wasn't the only one who thought Hillary had a bad night:

We now know something that we did not know before: When Hillary Clinton has a bad night, she really has a bad night.

In a debate against six Democratic opponents at Drexel University here Tuesday, Clinton gave the worst performance of her entire campaign.

It was not just that her answer about whether illegal immigrants should be issued driver's licenses was at best incomprehensible and at worst misleading.

It was that for two hours she dodged and weaved, parsed and stonewalled.

And when it was over, both the Barack Obama and John Edwards campaigns signaled that in the weeks ahead they intend to hammer home a simple message: Hillary Clinton does not say what she means or mean what she says.

And she gave them plenty of ammunition Tuesday night.

Debunked the first time -- it just didn't happen, folks -- the same exact story seems to be making the rounds again among the usual suspects in the world press as well as among the Fox Mulder "I Want To Believe" lefty bloggers.

Is the revival of the short-running morality play getting better reviews the second time 'round? Apparently not: Once again, MNF-I report there is no evidence such a spectacularly grisly find was made anywhere at any time.

But of course TPM and other lefty bloggers -- the "Reality Based Community," remember -- are championing the story.

Think of it as The Little Jihadi Agit-Prop That Could.

I think it's real I think it's real I think it's real...

I hope it's real I hope it's real I hope it's real...

I know it's real I know it's real I know it's real...

Alas, I have a feeling this latest attempt at summiting the hill of reality isn't going to go much better than the previous attempt.

Can I ask Joshua Micah Marshal a favor?

If your site is going to peddle discredited Al Qaeda/Mahdi Army propaganda, could you at least do us the favor of insuring the propaganda is fresh and not a rehash of long-discredited claims?

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal looks at John Murtha, earmarks and an FBI investigation:

In the massive 2008 military-spending bill now before Congress -- which could go to a House-Senate conference as soon as Thursday -- Mr. Murtha has steered more taxpayer funds to his congressional district than any other member. The Democratic lawmaker is chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, which will oversee more than $459 billion in military spending this year.

Johnstown's good fortune has come at the expense of taxpayers everywhere else. Defense contractors have found that if they open an office here and hire the right lobbyist, they can get lucrative, no-bid contracts. Over the past decade, Concurrent Technologies Corp., a defense-research firm that employs 800 here, got hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to Rep. Murtha despite poor reviews by Pentagon auditors. The National Drug Intelligence Center, with 300 workers, got $509 million, though the White House has tried for years to shut it down as wasteful and unnecessary. Another beneficiary: MTS Technologies, run by a man who got his start some 40 years ago shining shoes at Mr. Murtha's Johnstown Minute Car Wash.

A review by The Wall Street Journal of dozens of such contracts funded by Mr. Murtha's committee shows that many weren't sought by the military or federal agencies they were intended to benefit. Some were inefficient or mismanaged, according to interviews, public records and previously unpublished Pentagon audits. One Murtha-backed firm, ProLogic Inc., is under federal investigation for allegedly diverting public funds to develop commercial software, people close to the case say. The company denies wrongdoing and is in line to get millions of dollars more in the pending defense bill.

I'd say that further -- and broader -- investigation is warranted. Read the whole thing, as it's a free link.

The key assessment:

“The evidence fails to establish or even suggest any innocent or wholesome explanation for the events that led to Megahed’s arrest,” Merryday wrote.

“Guns, explosives, fuses, canisters of gasoline, ammunition, welding equipment, GPS devices, all-night interstate drives to an unstated and indeterminate destination, stops to check gun prices and availability, and computers with a recent history of visits to sites that feature the advocates and the means of violence are not attributes that a disinterested but cautious observer associates with a safe and tranquil citizen of the community,” the judge said.

“Rather, a person about whom these attributes are discovered is a person whose means, motive and degree of determination are unknown and unpredictable and who is highly suspicious and threatening.”

We’ve certainly come a long way from the innocent fireworks carriers looking for the beach scenario, haven’t we?

In 1995, George Soros appeared on PBS with Charlie Rose, and said this:

"I like to influence policy. I was not able to get to George Bush (Senior). But now I think I have succeeded with my influence...I do now have great access in the (Clinton) administration. There is no question about this. We actually work together as a team."

(The Shadow Party; David Horowitz and Richard Poe; p. 91)

So, even though Soros is hedging his political bets by donating to more than one candidate, his intimate ties to Hillary and Bill, going back more than a decade now, make it clear that he would prefer a 2^nd Clinton administration, where he is already part of the very in in-crowd.

Not so fast, you two. We're onto you.

Senators Reid and Harkin are taking their cues from Media Matters, a Soros-funded front group. As Hillary Clinton declared at the recent YearlyKos convention (her confirming sound bite played by Rush Limbaugh on the radio), she was the mastermind behind both The Center for American Progress (her think tank) and Media Matters (her media attack machine). Hillary provides the name and political connections that Soros craves, and Soros provides the money. Quite a powerful partnership, what some might even call a conspiracy.

If you want a complete rundown on how all of Hillary's and Soros' "non-profit groups" work together in her plan to take over America, get yourself a copy of the book by her mentor, Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals. In it, you'll find the complete outline for throwing Judeo/Christian principles and honesty to the winds of revolutionary fervor. Hillary Clinton has been the perfectly patient disciple of Alinsky's since she wrote her thesis about him her senior year at Wellesley in 1969. If her admiration of Alinsky had died with her thesis, no one would care. But it didn't. He remained a close confidant until his death (The Shadow Party, p. 56) and his tactical fingerprints are all over her projection of the false "Centrist" image she is manipulating to garner political power. It's all in the book.

The British National Health Service has launched an entire new industry: surgical tourism. The Daily Mail reports that the numbers of Britons seeking an escape from the universal health-care system will exceed 70,000 this year and 200,000 by 2010, flying to all parts of the world to get medical attention, and better surgical conditions:

Record numbers of Britons are travelling abroad for medical treatment to escape the NHS - with 70,000 patients expected to fly out this year.

And by the end of the decade 200,000 "health tourists" will fly as far as Malaysa and South Africa for major surgery to avoid long waiting lists and the rising threat of superbugs, according to a new report.

The first survey of Britons opting for treatment overseas shows that fears of hospital infections and frustration of often waiting months for operations are fuelling the increasing trend. ...

India is the most popular destination for surgery, followed by Hungary, Turkey, Germany, Malaysia, Poland and Spain. But dozens more countries are attracting health tourists.

Air America is booted off the dial in liberal Austin, Texas, provoking bewilderment at democraticunderground.com:

This is a city that is overwhelmingly Democratic, but the right-wing talk radio stations in town consistently get much better ratings.

Even commies don’t want to listen to commies.

When they may be starting to see the light in Austin, there is hope for us all.

Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times' media rumbler, Tim Rutten, boldly threw himself under The New Republic's bus in an effort to draw attention away from the magazine's ongoing collapse of credibility.

Confederate Yankee provides the reasons why Tim should never be mistaken for a journalist in a partial fisking --who has time to completely fisk Tim?-- that should leave a mark but won't because of Tim's regard for himself.

Rutten will be defending Mary Mapes and Dan Rather, the Fairness Doctrine, and the New Republic right through the day they shut off the lights at the incredibly shrinking LAT. Tim's an agenda journalist whose target --whose roadrunner-- are critics of the MSM. He's got a nice gig, and he is doing his very best to defend it, even if it means defending the clowns at The New Republic who abetted a smear of the troops and now cowardly hunker down and hope it will go away.

Those strategists who denounce Turkey for failing to join the U.S. intervention in Iraq might notice that Ankara has nonetheless helped our effort by making Incirlik available. America’s interests in all this are fairly plain. First, we need to keep Turkey as an ally. It is almost the sole stable element in an unstable but strategically vital area. A U.S. airbase in Kurdish Iraq, however useful, would be no compensation for the loss of Turkey. Second, we need to maintain the Kurdish regions as stable, prosperous, and pro-American areas in an otherwise turbulent Iraq. Third, in order to achieve both aims (and larger strategic purposes), we need to keep the Incirlik base open for the U.S. Its closure would be a far larger blow to the U.S.

What these interests suggest is that the U.S. should support a limited Turkish incursion into the remote mountainous regions of northern Iraq to destroy the PKK bases and, if possible, to capture or kill PKK leaders. This holds some risks for the stability of Iraq — there are always risks in military action — but it is perhaps the least bad option for Washington. It is all but undeniable that Ankara has a good moral and even legal justification for intervention. The PKK bases are situated away from major population areas — so intervention there need not lead inexorably to wider conflict. If handled sensibly, a limited intervention might even advance regional stability. Ideally, the U.S. and Iraqi forces would join the Turkish army in a combined operation for this purpose. At the very least, the U.S. should lean strongly on the Iraqi authorities not to protest seriously any Turkish action and to expel as many new Ocalans (and their cats) as possible.

In return the U.S. should seek strong public assurances — from Turkey’s generals as well as its politicians — that Ankara has no objection to the existence of a semi-autonomous Kurdish entity provided it is part of a united Iraq and provided too that it refuses to allow its territory to be used as a terrorist haven. After a lamentable period of drift in U.S. diplomacy with Turkey, Washington now seems to be moving toward some such approach. But this must be the start of a wholly new Turkey policy — one that accommodates Turkish interests while frankly contesting anti-Americanism in Turkish opinion.

Some have attributed the recent fires in Southern California to terrorism, but I've kinda waited for firm evidence to be forthcoming before drawing any conclusions. Here's Randi Rhodes putting a few things together about the causes of the fires through some kind of mental operation, but I'm not sure it's addition. She suspects it is terrorism, but you'll never guess who the terrorists might be.

Rhodes said (audio at source):

I started just doing Google searches to try and figure out. You know, arson, arson, it was like crazy trying to figure out why is that being downplayed? Why is that, you know, just a small part of the story? And you know, every time I look for it what comes up, believe it or not, is that Blackwater wants to move to San Diego and build this giant complex in San Diego right where most of the evacuations are taking place and you know. You just know wherever there is fire, this administration will be out there doing what it does best and that is fanning the flames, you know. It just spooks me, I can’t explain to you how creepy this whole thing is that you know, you’ve got these fires. Some of them are thought to be the work of arsonists and in the same breath you’ve got a community that’s on fire that just recently protested Blackwater West. Just recently said no to Blackwater and apparently you don’t do that. I mean, I don’t even know what to think. You know, nobody is saying Blackwater set the fires, that is nobody that doesn’t want their house burned down. Nobody is saying that, but it is all so bizarre that this is America and you have to sort of sit there and wonder … arson, same place Blackwater West wants to be, people protesting. And then you find out that some of the guys that used to work for Blackwater are now in Schwarzenegger’s administration. It’s all so creepy.

He’s the candidate of the common man, you see, heroically crusading against the Man’s abuses of power — “the Man” in this case being a grad student who dared offer a balanced report on why the champion of the poor has his campaign HQ in a relatively well-to-do part of town. They don’t call him Silky Phony for nothing:

A UNC-Chapel Hill journalism professor said John Edwards’ presidential campaign tried to kill a student’s video story about his campaign headquarters.

Associate Professor C.A. Tuggle said two top staffers for the former North Carolina senator demanded that the school drop the segment from the student-run television program “Carolina Week.” They also asked to have the video removed from the YouTube Web site.

Tuggle said they threatened to cut off access to Edwards for UNC student reporters and other student groups if the piece aired…

... A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground. Politics requires a minimum of shared assumptions. To compete you have to be playing the same game: you can't thwack the ball back and forth if one of you thinks he's playing baseball and the other fellow thinks he's playing badminton. Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can't do that if the guy you're talking to doesn't believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution.

Americans do not agree on the basic meaning of the last seven years. If you drive around an Ivy League college town -- home to the nation's best and brightest, allegedly -- you notice a wide range of bumper stickers, from the anticipatory ("01/20/09" -- the day of liberation from the Bush tyranny) to the profane ("Buck Fush") to the myopically self-indulgent ("Regime Change Begins At Home") to the exhibitionist paranoid ("9/11 Was An Inside Job"). Let's assume, as polls suggest, that next year's presidential election is pretty open: might be a Democrat, might be a Republican. Suppose it's another 50/50 election with a narrow GOP victory dependent on the electoral college votes of one closely divided state. It's not hard to foresee those stickered Dems concluding that the system has now been entirely delegitimized.

[....]

Well, it takes two to have a cold civil war. The right must be doing some of this stuff, too, surely? Up to a point. But for the most part they either go along, or secede from the system -- they home-school, turn to talk radio and the Internet, read Christian publishers' books that shift millions of copies without ever showing up on a New York Times bestsellers list. The established institutions of the state remain under the monolithic control of forces that ceaselessly applaud themselves for being terrifically iconoclastic:

Hollywood's latest war movie? Rendition. Oh, as in the same old song?

A college kid writes a four-word editorial in a campus newspaper -- "Taser this: F--k Bush" -- and the Denver Post hails him as "the future of journalism. Smart. Confident. Audacious." Anyone audacious enough to write "F--k Hillary" or "F--k Obama" at a college paper? Or would the Muse of Confident Smarts refer you to the relevant portions of the hate-speech code?

Speaking of which, Columbia University won't allow U.S. military recruiters on campus because "Don't ask, don't tell" discriminates against homosexuals, but it will invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government beheads you if they think you're bebottoming.

[....]

Fred Thompson will be issuing the following statement in about the next half hour:

I oppose the ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty at this time. The Treaty threatens U.S. sovereignty and gives a U.N.-affiliated organization far too much authority over U.S. interests in international waters. The American people also deserve ironclad assurances that the problems with the treaty highlighted by President Reagan more than two decades ago have been fixed. At a time when customary international law in this area has proven sufficient, I believe the efforts of treaty proponents would be better spent reforming the United Nations. Until such reforms are complete, I see little reason for the U.S. to move forward on the Law of the Sea Treaty.

Opposing the sovereignty-surrendering Law of the Sea Treaty is a very popular issue with many conservative groups...

Thompson’s new immigration platform is more hawkish than I expected. Not only does he understand the attrition argument, but his specifics are pretty good too: mandatory electronic verification of all new hires, enable Social Security cooperation with immigration authorities, withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities. And in what seems to be a first for a major presidential candidate, he calls for ending chain migration by discontinuing all family-related immigration except for the spouses and minor children of American citizens (as well as eliminating the visa lottery). If all other categories remained the same, such changes would have reduced the legal immigration in 2006 by nearly 400,000, from nearly 1.3 million to a little under 900,000. That’s still way too high, but it’s moving in the right direction.

Clyburn was right. The Surge is working. Democrats panic

The No. 3 Democrat in the House, James Clyburn of South Carolina, let the cat out of the bag this summer when he said if the Surge works, that would be “a real big problem for us.”

The Surge is working. Violent deaths have dropped in Iraq by 70% since the Surge began. The latest Reuters poll shows the Democratic Congress’s job approval is at 11%.

11%.

That means 8 out of 9 Americans don’t approve. The Democratic Congress has turned off 267 million people.

That is because it has done nothing but investigate inside-the-beltway nonsense and debate the Iraq war. Threatening to cut off funding for the troops is not cool, no matter how unpopular the war is.

The Hill reported Speaker Nancy Pelosi will try to put a smiley face on congressional incompetence by going on a PR tour in November.

The Hill quoted the No. 2 House Democrat Steny Hoyer of Maryland: “We’re concerned obviously that the accomplishments of both the House and Senate are overshadowed by failure to change direction in Iraq. We’re hoping in the next three or four months to make it clear what has been done and make it clear we are upset that more has not been accomplished because of the president’s refusal to change direction.”

What accomplishments? Name them. In a letter to colleagues, Pelosi asked them to talk up those “accomplishments” — a hike in the minimum wage that affects 1% of all workers and more student loans — so colleges can jack up tuition even higher.

Pelosi’s credibility, however, is not very high. The Politico reported top aides to Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn called a mandatory meeting for top Democratic staffers Monday to announce “a major member-driven message campaign” that leaders hope to sustain through the end of the year.

Politico quoted a senior Democratic leadership aide, who said, “The best people to deliver this message are individual members.”

I smell panic.

Smells like... (dare I say it?) victory. Read the rest.

Does Bin Ladenism or Salafism or whatever we agree to call it have anything in common with fascism?

I think yes. The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

Fascism (and Nazism) also attempted to counterfeit the then-success of the socialist movement by issuing pseudo-socialist and populist appeals. It has been very interesting to observe lately the way in which al-Qaida has been striving to counterfeit and recycle the propaganda of the anti-globalist and green movements. (See my column on Osama Bin Laden's Sept. 11 statement.)

There isn't a perfect congruence. Historically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure. There isn't much of a corporate structure in the Muslim world, where the conditions often approximate more nearly to feudalism than capitalism, but Bin Laden's own business conglomerate is, among other things, a rogue multinational corporation with some links to finance-capital. As to the nation-state, al-Qaida's demand is that countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia be dissolved into one great revived caliphate, but doesn't this have points of resemblance with the mad scheme of a "Greater Germany" or with Mussolini's fantasy of a revived Roman empire?

Technically, no form of Islam preaches racial superiority or proposes a master race. But in practice, Islamic fanatics operate a fascistic concept of the "pure" and the "exclusive" over the unclean and the kufar or profane. In the propaganda against Hinduism and India, for example, there can be seen something very like bigotry. In the attitude to Jews, it is clear that an inferior or unclean race is being talked about (which is why many Muslim extremists like the grand mufti of Jerusalem gravitated to Hitler's side). In the attempted destruction of the Hazara people of Afghanistan, who are ethnically Persian as well as religiously Shiite, there was also a strong suggestion of "cleansing." And, of course, Bin Laden has threatened force against U.N. peacekeepers who might dare interrupt the race-murder campaign against African Muslims that is being carried out by his pious Sudanese friends in Darfur.

This city, famous for being America's playground, has also become its security lab. Like nowhere else in the United States, Las Vegas has embraced the twin trends of data mining and high-tech surveillance, with arguably more cameras per square foot than any airport or sports arena in the country. Even the city's cabs and monorail have cameras. As the U.S. government ramps up its efforts to forestall terrorist attacks, some privacy advocates view the city as a harbinger of things to come.

In secret rooms in casinos across Las Vegas, surveillance specialists are busy analyzing information about players and employees. Relying on thousands of cameras in nearly every cranny of the casinos, they evaluate suspicious behavior. They ping names against databases that share information with other casinos, sometimes using facial-recognition software to validate a match. And in the marketing suites, casino staffers track players' every wager, every win or loss, the better to target high-rollers for special treatment and low- and middle-rollers for promotions.

"You could almost look at Vegas as the incubator of a whole host of surveillance technologies," said James X. Dempsey, policy director for the Center for Democracy and Technology. Those technologies, he said, have spread to other commercial venues: malls, stadiums, amusement parks.

And although that is "problematic," he said, "the spread of the techniques to counterterrorism is doubly worrisome. Finding a terrorist is much harder than finding a card counter, and the consequences of being wrongly labeled a terrorist are much more severe than being excluded from a casino."

Read the rest of this extremely interesting article here.

The fact that Obama apparently feels comfortable showing his contempt for long-standing traditions speaks volumes about the man. His continued refusal to honor the flag of the United States smacks of disloyalty and defiance, but it also suggests an inability to gauge the ripples of controversy created by his actions -- not a quality we would want in the leader of our nation. For a politician running for the highest office in the land to deliberately and publicly refrain from showing respect for his country is sheer idiocy! The flag may be just a piece of cloth, but better men than Barack Obama have died to preserve what it stands for. Most Americans acknowledge that.....and so should Obama.

Obama's defenders have been quick to point out that the photo in question is not a video, and that Obama simply may have been the last to raise his hand to his heart or the first to put it down. If, however, the photo is an accurate account of the events, Obama's action -- or lack thereof -- should not be taken lightly. America doesn't need a citizen of the world with globalist ideas right now. We need a president who is committed to the United States and the United States alone.....a leader who can accurately estimate the consequences of his actions and who is not above placing his hand on his heart to honor the flag and the anthem of the country he serves.

All describe the bizarro-world contrast between what most Americans seem to think is happening in Iraq versus what is really happening in Iraq. Knowing this disconnect exists and experiencing it directly are two separate matters. It’s like the difference between holding the remote control during the telecast of a volcanic eruption on some distant island (and then flipping the channel), versus running for survival from a wretch of molten lava that just engulfed your car.

I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq. In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.

No thinking person would look at last year’s weather reports to judge whether it will rain today, yet we do something similar with Iraq news. The situation in Iraq has drastically changed, but the inertia of bad news leaves many convinced that the mission has failed beyond recovery, that all Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, or are waiting for us to leave so they can crush their neighbors. This view allows our soldiers two possible roles: either “victim caught in the crossfire” or “referee between warring parties.” Neither, rightly, is tolerable to the American or British public. ...

Read the whole thing.