Your generous
donations help keep
this site running.
Visa/MC/PayPal accepted.
I admit I was going to give this week's award to Henry Waxman, who (as Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform) singlehandedly seems to be taking on the job of investigating Bush's numerous power grabs and fiascos, perhaps he'll qualify for a special "Most Impressive Democrat of the Year" award later.
There is one thing that just about everybody in the Iraq debate agrees on, from President Bush to anti-war Democrats to Republicans to the generals on the ground: that the biggest thing we want to avoid in Iraq is a "wider regional war." No matter what your position on Iraq, from "leave troops there for 50 years like in South Korea" to "bring all troops home tomorrow," pretty much everybody agrees that a wider war which involves Iraq's neighbors is a thing to be avoided if at all possible.
We're now on the brink of that war starting, but we barely even realize it because it's happening from a direction we haven't been paying much attention to -- Turkey. Now, I personally have been warning for a long time that the situation with Turkey could put the United States in a very tough spot, both diplomatically and militarily. Last year (8/9/06) I wrote:
Senator Chris Dodd wins the inaugural MIDOTW award for showing how Democrats are supposed to behave. He has tossed down the gauntlet on the wiretapping bill working its way through the Senate, and will put a "hold" on any bill which comes out of committee that provides amnesty for telecommunications companies which have broken wiretapping laws in the past by cooperating with Big Brother and just meekly handing over data without a warrant to compel them.
Well done Senator Dodd! The first ever Golden Backbone is yours in a landslide!
Getting a clear picture of the situation on the ground in the middle of an occupation or war is a hard thing to do. For various reasons, it's hard to trust the reports from the Pentagon, the embedded media, or politicians of either stripe, because their views are usually skewed in one direction or another.
Which is why I give much more weight to first-person accounts from soldiers who have been there. And you can call me anti-elitist, but the lower the rank of the soldier, the more weight I give to their accounts. I see it as: the closer you get to the bottom, the tougher jobs you likely will have performed. This may not be fair, but I wanted to lay out my own personal biases (since I'm criticizing everyone else's).
Conventional wisdom (or at least the self-proclaimed sages of political conventional wisdom, the Washington punditry) has been telling us that the 2008 presidential election is going to be The Most Important Election In Modern Times (if not actually In History), and that (of course) the electorate is More Polarized Than Ever -- which explains not only how incredibly early the contest started, but also the fierce battles for the primaries now being waged.
But what if this conventional wisdom turns out to be wrong? What if the 2008 election is a real snooze-fest, and voters are barely motivated to go to the polls?
I must say, Charles Rangel impressed me last weekend, on CBS' Face The Nation, as he is the first Democrat I've heard yet using the "block grant" argument against the Republican spin on SCHIP. Modesty forbids me to take any credit, but if he is indeed reading these columns I'd like to say, "Well done, Representative Rangel!"
The elitism and disdain dripping from Pelosi's comments are staggering, considering the fact that she knew she was on the record when she uttered them. Not content to rail against anti-war protesters on her front sidewalk (which likely would have been enough to gain her some sympathy from normal people, who might agree that the protesters had crossed some line of propriety), Pelosi can't resist the urge to twist the knife by complaining about the First Amendment. Wow. You don't hear Democrats saying things like this very often, for a good reason -- the Democratic base actually believes the First Amendment is a good thing.
Sovereignty (n) -- government free from external control
Is Iraq a truly sovereign state, or is the Maliki government a puppet of America? We may know the answer to this crucial question in a very short time. Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki could show independence from American interests in many ways, some of them decidedly not to President Bush's liking.
Is Basra a lot better than when the British were holed up downtown? Or is it a lot worse? Or is it currently experiencing a lull in violence that will prove to be the calm before the storm of factional Shi'ite war? Or are the Iraqi militias actually working out their differences with agreements rather than bullets?
Of course, this is not Jeffersonian democracy at its finest. It's closer to warlordism than we'd care to admit as a nation. The process is going to be messy and unpleasant, no matter how it works out. And the lessons of Basra likely can't be applied to other parts of Iraq (due to different ethnic and sectarian populations).
But, as I said previously, Basra bears watching. Because there is a larger question to be asked here: If U.S. troops pull out, will Iraq become more or less stable when we're not around to shoot at anymore?
