Jay Reding.com

Captain Ed has some thoughts on the latest round of Minnesota polling, this time from a credible poll. SurveyUSA’s latest poll shows Pawlenty trouncing Democratic challenger Mike Hatch, and Mark Kennedy within striking distance of Amy Klobuchar.

I think SurveyUSA’s results are fairly accurate. I don’t think that Hatch has a chance in hell against the relatively popular Pawlenty, who’s polling at a healthy 50%. Pawlenty leads in nearly every demographic, even with minorities. Pawlenty has the kind of common touch that makes a successful politician, and while he’s had his rough moments (”health impact fee”?! Puh-lease!) his tenure in office has been a success for the state of Minnesota. Even if the people who still think the Independence Party matters all defect to Hatch, Pawlenty’s lead is still strong.

Mark Kennedy is only beginning to campaign, and he’s going to have a tough race against Klobuchar. Being 5 points down isn’t a great place to be, but that indicates that this race is still within striking distance. At the end of the day Klobuchar is running against Bush, despite the fact that his name isn’t on the ballot. Klobuchar’s position on the war, supporting a quick exit, but not a timeline for withdrawal, is the same as Kennedy’s (and everyone else’s for that matter). Kennedy will have a very tough race, but he can certainly still win.

One interesting point of commonality between the Minnesota Poll and the SurveyUSA poll is that Kennedy has a healthy lead in the 18-34 demographic, which is traditionally a Democratic-leaning demographic group. I’m not sure what the explanation for this is, although I suspect that the fact that Minnesota has produced a bumper crop of young Republican political activists in recent years may have something to do with it.

The Democrats are hoping that dissatisfaction with Bush will lead them to victory in Minnesota. However, the Republican Party of Minnesota has the organization to win, and the demographics of some of these races don’t seem very good for the Democrats. Much of it will come down to a combination of organization and drive – if Republican voters are motivated, the GOP could sweep Minnesota. If the Democrats prove to be more motivated (and Bush hatred is a powerful motivating force for them) Kennedy could be in deep trouble.

We’ll see how things work out as Election Day draws closer.

The Washington Times reports on a Harris poll that found that 50% of Americans believe that Iraq had WMDs at the time of the US invasion.

While anti-war activists will decry this number, the idea that it’s utterly irrational to believe such a thing is wrong. We haven’t found any proof that Saddam had anything but heavily degraded leftovers, but it remains quite possible that what he did have was either hastily destroyed or shipped elsewhere. The argument that Saddam did not have WMD and that Bush lied about it all is the real delusion – absence of evidence does not imply evidence of absence, especially when there is some new and quite tantalizing documentary evidence in newly released documents suggesting an active chemical program.

Granted, nobody has proof either way, and the information is often conflicting. However, it’s not surprising that many thing Saddam did have WMDs. We know he had and used them in 1988. We know from Richard Butler’s UNSCOM report in 1998 that Iraq was deliberately hiding something from inspectors and that significant amounts of material remains unaccounted for.

The burden of documenting Iraq’s WMD stocks was always upon the former Iraqi regime, and they failed to do so. Whether or not Iraq really did have WMDs in 2003 or not is now a largely academic question – what is important is ensuring that yet another terrorist regime doesn’t spring up in Iraq and that the nascent free Iraqi government has a chance to defend itself against those who would tear Iraq apart.

Amazingly, distractions make learning difficult!

Also, fire is hot, round things roll, and Ted Kennedy likes scotch.

Thomas Ricks has an extremely critical piece in The Washington Post on the post-war planning in Iraq and how American actions may have spurred on the Sunni insurgency:

Exacerbating the effect of this decision were the U.S. Army’s interactions with the civilian population. Based on its experience in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Army thought it could prevail through “presence” — that is, soldiers demonstrating to Iraqis that they are in the area, mainly by patrolling.

“We’ve got that habit that carries over from the Balkans,” one Army general said. Back then, patrols were conducted so frequently that some officers called the mission there “DAB”-ing, for “driving around Bosnia.”

The U.S. military jargon for this was “boots on the ground,” or, more officially, the presence mission. There was no formal doctrinal basis for this in the Army manuals and training that prepare the military for its operations, but the notion crept into the vocabularies of senior officers.

For example, a briefing by the 1st Armored Division’s engineering brigade stated that one of its major missions would be “presence patrols.” And then-Maj. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, then the commander of that division, ordered one of his brigade commanders to “flood your zone, get out there, and figure it out.” Sitting in a dusty command tent outside a palace in the Green Zone in May 2003, he added: “Your business is to ensure that the presence of the American soldier is felt, and it’s not just Americans zipping by.”

The flaw in this approach, Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek, a civil affairs officer, later noted, was that after Iraqi public opinion began to turn against the Americans and see them as occupiers, “then the presence of troops . . . becomes counterproductive.”…

Few U.S. soldiers seemed to understand the centrality of Iraqi pride and the humiliation Iraqi men felt in being overseen by this Western army. Foot patrols in Baghdad were greeted during this time with solemn waves from old men and cheers from children, but with baleful stares from many young Iraqi men.

There may be something to this argument. I disagree that disbanding the Iraqi Army was necessarily a bad idea – there wasn’t much an an Army left to disband, and given that the military was Saddam Hussein’s primary method of suppressing Shi’ites, Kurds, and other minorities, keeping around the old military may have placated the Sunnis while causing dire problems with the other 70% of Iraq.

Would a less blatant US presence have helped in Iraq? It’s quite possible, although I have my doubts. I’m not sure that we could fight a successful counterinsurgency in Iraq without the help of the Iraqi people – and that requires us keeping close relations with the people. The successes we’ve had have been in places where we have solid cooperation between our troops and the locals. It’s really a Catch-22 situation: being on patrol can increase resentment, but if we don’t patrol we can’t develop intelligence and we can’t stop the kind of lawlessness that’s tearing Iraq apart right now.

It’s another reminder that counterinsurgency isn’t about “good” options – it’s all about tradeoffs. Had we kept the Iraqi military in place and former Ba’athist officials in government, it may have alleviated the Sunni problem, while ensuring that the majority Shi’ites were alienated from government. Adding more troops would have helped us deal with the lawlessness problem in the early days of the war, but would have meant more money, and stretched our logistical lines thinner – leading to more casualties. What the critics of this war continually fail to understand in their zeal to attack the Administration that launched this war is that the decisions that were made were made in the fog of war, and dealing with an incredibly fluid situation. It’s easy for some to play armchair Clausewitz, but it’s another thing to try to determine what the best course of action is in the heat of the Iraqi sun.

Still, many of the criticisms in the Post article are valid ones. Iraq is in many ways a laboratory to understand what works and what doesn’t – because the type of war we’re fighting in Iraq will be the type of war we’ll be fighting in the future. What matters is less about the mistakes we made in the fog of war three years ago, but the way in which we’re adapting our doctrines to fix those mistakes in future conflicts.

A group of American Bar Association lawyers are arguing that President Bush’s use of executive signing statements constitutes a violation of the principle of separation of powers. The Volokh Conspiracy has an example of such a statement in regards to the PATRIOT Act.

Ramesh Ponnuru had some intelligent observations on signining statements in The Corner. I agree with him on the fourth point: if Bush believed that the text of a piece of legislation was blatantly unconstitutional, he should veto the bill. That is where the Founders gave the Executive the ability to shape legislation. The President does have the right to argue that the Executive Branch must carry out the requirements of a piece of legislation in a certain way, but he has no right to argue that a piece of legislation does not apply at all. Some of the President’s signing statements clearly fall under Ponnuru’s fourth category.

As Justice Stevens wrote in Clinton v. City of New York (which struck down the Line Item Veto Act of 1996):

Something that might be known as “Public Law 105—33 as modified by the President” may or may not be desirable, but it is surely not a document that may “become a law” pursuant to the procedures designed by the Framers of Article I, §7, of the Constitution.

If there is to be a new procedure in which the President will play a different role in determining the final text of what may “become a law,” such change must come not by legislation but through the amendment procedures set forth in Article V of the Constitution.

The same basic principle applies here. If the President is doing more than interpreting the statutory requirements of a piece of legislation in the absence of clear direction, he’s violating the Constitution. The President is the head of a unitary Executive Branch as defined in Article II, §1. However, the President’s defense mechanism for preserving and protecting Executive power isn’t contained in signing statements which alter the substance of legislation: they’re found in the President’s veto power and if necessary ajudication by the Supreme Court.

I agree that some of the rules passed by Congress were encroachments on the Executive mandate as Commander in Chief and were harmful to the security of the United States and its citizens. However, the President does not have the right to alter the substance of legislation short of a Constitutional amendment granting him such powers. His sole power to alter legislation is through the use of his Article I, §7 veto powers. President Bush’s use of signing statements may cross that line, in which case those statements are unconstitutional and therefore null and void.

However, the use of signing statements themselves are not inherently unconstitutional – and there are precedents for the President to essentially ignore acts of Congress – however, I agree with Jefferson when he wrote that:

[the President's veto power] is the shield provided by the constitution to protect against the invasions of the legislature [of] 1. the rights of the Executive 2. of the Judiciary 3. of the states and state legislatures.

President Bush has vetoed one bill in his entire term of office. He has signed several bills which he has argued are blatantly unconstitution, such as McCain-Feingold. If the President does not wish to exercise his veto power, then he has to live with the legislation he signs.

UPDATE: Ed Whelan strongly argues against the ABA’s position on signing statements. I agree with him that some of the ABA’s arguments reach to rhetorical excess, but when is it Constitutionally acceptable for the Executive to take an action which directly alters the intent of legislation? We conservatives get rightfully upset when the Judiciary tries to impose their will through the “interpretation” legislation – why should it be any different for the Executive?

The job of the President is to veto unconstitutional legislation. That is the Executive’s recourse to badly-crafted or unconstitutional legislation from Congress. President Bush has tried to make an end-run around the process to avoid making politically risky stands on key issues. Even if the President happens to be right, it’s still not the correct way of going about things.

Ralph Kinney Bennett has an exceptionally provocative piece on the use of civilians as a weapon by terrorist groups like Hizb’Allah. He observes:

Those who have visited any Hezbollah installation in Lebanon over the years always remark on the fact that there are always families, women and children, in and around the place. “Secret” installations are usually hidden in plain site — in houses or apartment buildings.

Seldom, if ever, has a guerrilla movement been able to so openly and exquisitely weave itself into the fabric of a society as Hezbollah has done in Lebanon.

If the civilians in and around these operational bases happen to be of Hezbollah’s own brand of Islam they automatically become a part of the “sacrificial,” suicidal equation. Often without choice or foreknowledge, they die an “honorable” death in the battle against infidels or apostates.

If the civilians happen to be of some other persuasion, Islamic or otherwise, their deaths are not even worth a shrug. However, these mangled bodies and wailing women with arms outstretched do provide an immense propaganda payoff, especially in the Western “crusader” media — which still places a quaint value on human life.

Terrorists are different from combatants precisely because they very deliberately involve civilians in warfare. There has always been an understood “warriors code” that discriminates between non-combatant and combatant populations in conflicts – this is one of the bedrock principles in Just War Theory, and even the great Muslim general Saladin allowed free passage and amnesty for non-combatant Christians during the Crusades. Terrorists like members of Hizb’Allah or al-Qaeda do not have such scruples. As Bennett observes, there is no delineation made between non-combatants and combatant forces. In bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa against the West he states:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it… (emphasis mine)

Al-Qaeda’s view of warfare is somewhat similar to the concept of total war. In fact, what bin Laden is truly seeking is something even more forceful: absolute war – a war in which every part of society is dedicated towards the war effort. Von Clauswitz argued that the concept of absolute war was impossible – there would always be some moderating influence in society.

However, radical Islam divides the world into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb - the House of Islam and the House of War. It is believed that every Muslim’s divinely-mandated spiritual duty is to bring all of humanity into the fold of Islam or destroy them. The terms of such a belief are innately totalitarian – the term “Islam” literally means “submission” and the radical school of thought represented by the radical Salafists, Wahhabists, and followers of Qutb take that literal meaning to its extreme.

The postmodern way of war is in many ways an utter betrayal of Clausewitz. Paul Mirengoff made and interesting remark on Power Line that reveals a salient point about today’s postmodern school of war in regards to the current Israel/Hizb’Allah conflict:

The current fighting in the Middle East has put the American left, and other accommodationists, in a difficult position. Ordinary Americans of all political persuasions understand that a terrorist organization that has killed Americans is attacking one of our allies. Accordingly, most of the Bush-haters I know, Jew and non-Jew, see no reason to stand in the way of an Israeli response that offers the possibility of inflicting a complete defeat on Hezbollah.

But such a response, and perhaps the very concept of completely defeating an enemy, is foreign to the thinking of sophisticated liberals. Thus, a middle ground had to be staked out, and the liberal elite found such ground in the form of their favorite notion — the martial time-table. Thus, Israel would be given a few weeks to try to inflict enough damage on Hezbollah to prevent future bombing of its cities and towns. After that, regardless of its degree of success, Israel would cease hostilities and turn responsibility for protecting its security over to the U.N., NATO, the Lebanese government, or some combination thereof.

The concept of fighting a war for a limited, pre-established duration is, to put it gently, a post-modern one. Prior to the left’s call for a time-table in Iraq, I’m not aware of any precedent for this peculiar approach to warfare. So it is fair to ask, what are the reasons why Israel should be allowed only a few weeks to finish a military operation it initiated in order to prevent its citizens from being bombed by an enemy committed to Israel’s destruction?

Mirengoff is right. The idea that warfare can be accomplished on a set timetable is ridiculous. As the old saying goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. It is impossible to say that a war must only continue for X amount of time – the goal of warfare isn’t to inflict a certain amount of damage in a given period of time, it’s to prevent the enemy from continuing the war. In short, the problem that postmodern thinkers have with war is that it’s decidedly against the values of postmodern thinking. In war, in order to be successful, someone must lose.

A war half-finished is a dangerous thing, it ensures future conflicts – often more deadly than the first. The only way that we can prevent the specter of Islamic terrorism from shadowing us for decades is to defeat the Islamic terrorist movement. That means utterly and completely crushing them. That means making it very clear that particular form of virulent Islam is a guaranteed ticket to a futile death. The concept that “violence begets violence” is not at all true – if it were wars would always be futile, and civilization would have collapsed decades ago. What history teaches us, and what military thinkers from Sun T’zu and Clausewitz on down remind us, is that the only way to end a war for the long term is to be victorious against the enemy.

That means that our will must be greater than that of our enemies. It means we’re in a long and protracted campaign in which the cowardly and disgusting tactics of our enemy guarantee a higher number of civilian casualties than we’d like. That means that states like Syria and Iran cannot be left to fester. That means that the United States will have to continue to sacrifice more blood and treasure in order to ensure that the next terrorist attack doesn’t involve the destruction of a city and the death of millions.

The reality is that if we truly value peace, we must realize that the only peace we will have is the peace that can only be obtained through victory. Everything else is illusory. Our enemy is fighting the closest thing to absolute war against us that we’ve seen – they’re not liable to hold back anything against us. If they obtain weapons of mass destruction the results could be apocalyptic. We have never faced an enemy so unconstrained by basic concerns of humanitarianism, and if we ensure that such tactics become entirely futile, we may never again. This war won’t be won on a timetable, nor will it be won cheaply, nor will it leave innocents unscathed. However, those who think war too brutal should consider the consequences – what if millennia of Just War tradition were replaced with the radical Islamist’s view of radical war? What if the use of civilians as a weapon continues to gain currency, and the current pattern of escalation into ever-more-daring acts of terrorism continues? What would our world look like then?

The reason why war exists is because sometimes it’s better than the alternatives.

UPDATE: Here is something else to consider:

Democracies are particularly vulnerable to losing “protracted conflicts against irregular foes.” He cites Gil Merom’s observation that “democracies fail in small wars because they find it extremely difficult to escalate the level of violence and brutality to that which can secure victory.”

Sadly, that may well be right…

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is in the war-torn Lebanese capital of Beirut in an effort to end the conflict between Lebanon, Israel, and the terrorist group Hizb’Allah. Rice’s trip to Beirut is a rather audacious move designed to show how serious the US is about finding an end to the conflict in which the Lebanese are essentially caught in the middle. Unfortunately, the only way there can be a solution to this conflict is if Hizb’Allah is disarmed and unable to hold the Lebanese state hostage – and that solution can only be reached through military means.

Israel has realized that the United Nations is an enemy of the State of Israel and has accordingly rejected calls for yet another feckless UN “security force” along the lines of UNIFIL which spend the past 28 years ignoring tens of thousands of Katyusha rockets being buried ten stories deep right under their noses. Instead, it appears that the best mutually-agreeable solution is a NATO-based peacekeeping force such as the one in Kosovo or Afghanistan. The UN simply cannot be trusted to do what they failed to do over the past three decades.

What cannot be made negotiable is that Hizb’Allah must be completely disarmed. Any foreign government that attempts to rearm Hizb’Allah’s military forces should be put under immediate sanction. Lebanon’s government must be made able to provide full control over their sovereign territory as soon as is possible. Unlike the UN’s “interim” force, this NATO peacekeeping operation must have a clear metric for success – the ability of a free Lebanese force to replace them.

As rockets continue to rain down on Haifa and other cities and villiages in northern Israel, it should be a reminder that those rockets were installed and hidden under the direct watch of a UN “peacekeeping” force – a force that was incompetent at best and may have cooperated with Hizb’Allah. The UN should be called to account for their actions in Lebanon, but sadly accountability and the UN are two concepts which never seem to occupy the same table.

Secretary Rice is doing the best she can to end the conflict, but ultimately her role can only truly begin once Hizb’Allah no longer poses a military threat to Israel. Then and only then can there be a end to this conflict.