Jay Reding.com

Captain Ed reports on some positive news coming out of Iraq for a change — apparently our efforts to secure Baghdad are bearing some fruit.

Still, we have a long way to go before the security situation in Iraq is sufficiently stabilized to show real progress. The rise of sectarianism in Iraq puts the nation on the razor’s edge of civil war, and our previous efforts to pacify the country have been anything but successful. What progress has been made in the past three years threatens to be subsumed in a wave of increasing violence.

Securing Baghdad is the most critical problem we face at the moment, and that requires going after the sectarian militias such as the Mahdi Army. Perhaps our biggest mistake in Iraq was not imprisoning or killing Moqtada al-Sadr when we had the chance — his presence has caused us nothing but grief ever since. He’s nothing but a two-bit Iranian-backed thug with delusions of grandeur. While Ayatollah Sistani’s deal to allow him to participate in politics in April of 2004 defused a tense situation in Najaf, ultimately it may have been better to have dealt with him then rather than allowing him to cause so many problems.

No matter what we should have done earlier, we have a job to do in the here and now, and the US should continue to put pressure on the sectarian militias to disarm and destroy those who don’t renounce violence. The state’s monopoly of violence is a key element to a stable social contract, and so long as paramilitary death squads are allowed to run freely in Iraq, even using the Interior Ministry forces as recruiting grounds, the situation in Iraq will continue to be dire.

The Iranian regime has reportedly offered to enter into “serious negotiations” over their nuclear program, but will not stop enriching uranium or continuing to develop nuclear weapons technologies. And really, why should they? They know quite well that the UN is impotent and toothless, the EU has neither the political will nor the military ability to stop them, and both the US and Israel are already too constrained in the region to seriously act.

All the Iranians are doing is stalling for more time. They’re undoubtedly close to developing a nuclear weapon within the next two years, and possibly much sooner. Once they possess nuclear weapons, they become virtually untouchable.

We simply don’t have any good options in this case. Military action is always a choice of last resort, and our military options in regards to Iran have never been good, even without the issue of Iraq getting in the way. The Iranians continue to call our bluff. They know that ultimately they’re negotiating from a position of strength, while we in the West don’t have the courage and ability to force them to give up their nuclear ambitions.

Across the globe, dangerous regimes continue to test the world’s willingness to fight for their values and keep the global order — and we keep failing that test. Sooner or later a fatal provocation will occur, and the events of the last twenty years may well be remembered as fatefully filled with naïvete as the twenty years between the First and Second World Wars.

The Pioneer Press had an interesting piece this weekend on how the political dynamics in Minnesota are still trending towards the GOP:

The national scene seems to portend Democratic gains in governorships and Congressional seats, possibly leading to Democratic control of Congress. Low job approval for President Bush and Congress result from a familiar litany of problems — endless conflict in Iraq, high energy prices, anxieties about international turmoil and ongoing domestic controversies over immigration and health care.

Democrats, however, have not quite closed the deal with American voters. Surveys reveal them as unpopular as Republicans. Democrats have yet to present an appealing alternative to the GOP agenda. It will be up to individual Congressional candidates — in Minnesota, most notably Senate aspirant Amy Klobuchar and 6th District House candidate Patty Wetterling — to make the case for change. So far, their national party has not carried that argument with likely voters.

Running directly contrary to this national current is the favorable trend for the GOP in Minnesota state politics. This trend is of recent vintage. Part of it stems from growing GOP party identification in the state, detected in a recent Star Tribune Minnesota poll. In addition, a peaceful state legislative session, a budget surplus, improved economic growth and job creation all help Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty and GOP state legislative candidates.

I would also had that the Republican Party of Minnesota is one of the most disciplined and effective political organizations out there today. When it comes to identifying voters and getting them to the polls, the state GOP has it down. This is also part of a national trend in which the GOP has been doing an excellent job in terms of GOTV efforts. The Democrats still retain a slight edge in party ID, but that edge is slipping. Part of it is due to the changing nature of the US electorate — the unions, which used to be the Democratic Party’s biggest asset, are slowly being replaced by a more independent workforce. Blue states are generally losing population, while Red states are gaining. Even with immigration and urbanization, the GOP still holds a slight demographic advantage.

As the article notes, it also helps that there are deep divisions just under the surface of the DFL. The DFLers I’ve spoken to have noted that there’s a pretty substantial divide between the urban liberals and the traditional Farmer-Labor voters. The war in Iraq has become a political litmus test here in Minnesota for Democrats just as it has been national, and candidates such as Amy Klobuchar who are trying to find a moderate path are getting pushed by hardcore anti-war voters. Discipline is key to a political party’s future, and the DFL’s divisions could slow down their ground game come election time.

That doesn’t mean that Minnesota is likely to go red any time soon. However, it does show that even in largely inhospitable political climates, a disciplined and effective political operation can still win. The unpopularity of the President doesn’t necessarily effect local races — in fact, it has a very small effect, if any. When it comes to having a solid ground game, the GOP is doing quite well, which is how so many state offices are held by Republicans despite Minnesota being considered a very blue state.

The Iraqi Ambassador to the United States, Samir Sumaida’ie has an important editorial in today’s Washington Post on why it is critical that we not abandon Iraq at this critical juncture:

Our enemies’ strategy has never changed: creating mayhem and making Iraq ungovernable, thereby driving the Americans and their allies out, and installing a Saddam Hussein look-alike to “make peace.” In pursuing this strategy, they have forged many alliances and changed course and tactics many times.

Just as they kept to their strategy and adapted, we should do the same. In this context, “staying the course” should mean being ready to adapt and learn while also standing firm for democracy and for a new vision for the country and the region. If we abandon our effort, our enemies win by default.

That’s just the issue. The consequences of a premature departure of American forces from Iraq would be nothing less than an unmitigated disaster. Isolationists on both the left and right wings cannot ignore the fact that the Middle East is a strategic region in world affairs — as nice as it would be to no longer be dependent on Middle Eastern oil, we are, and an instability in that region that threatens regional warfare would be devastating not only to the United States, but to everyone else as well. We simply cannot afford to allow that to happen.

The arguments of the left keep coming around to defeatism. It’s one thing to suggest that the current course of events has proven our plans to be ill-conceived. It’s entirely another to suggest that Iraq is unwinnable. It isn’t, and to say such a thing only demonstrates to other troublemakers that the military force of the United States can be defeated in short order by small groups of terrorists. Such a lesson will not go unnoticed in Tehran, Damascus, Pyongyang, and other places where those who intend us harm lurk. We’re already dangerously close to setting that precedent already.

The fact remains that this is, and always has been, predominantly a war of wills. Over a three-year long conflict we’ve lost fewer than 3,000 soldiers in two theaters of operations. One should never belittle the enormous loss that each one of those casualties represents, but in military terms never in the course of human history has so much been done with so few losses. A significant number of our own soldiers who have lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan have been equipped with prosthetics and gone back into battle. Their determination and sense of purpose is strong. If we want to win this war, our determination must be as great as theirs.

The people of Iraq also know the stakes. As the Ambassador writes:

Is all this achievable? We know it is. Iraqis are resilient. They thirst for normality and a chance to build a future in freedom and dignity. They are fighting and dying for it every day — witness the numbers enlisting in the security forces despite horrific losses. Witness the support Iraqi women are providing for the political process, and the potential of their emancipation.

The Iraqis are on the front line of this conflict. Their home is the war zone. We have an obligation to assist them as much as we can for as long as we can. That doesn’t mean that Iraqi will become a permanent American protectorate, but it does mean that once we toppled the Hussein regime we should have walked away and washed our hands of the whole affair. Such an act would be deeply irresponsible. Whether or not it was right to remove the Hussein regime in 2003 is now an academic question. It cannot be undone. What we need now is a strategy for achieving victory, not how we can best tuck our tail between our legs.

Achieving victory in Iraq has been hard, and we have made progress, but as long as our enemy thinks that their will is greater than ours, we’re only sowing the seeds of our own defeat. Those who have chosen to use this war for their partisan political purposes are, intentionally or not, emboldening our enemies and proving bin Laden’s observation that America was but a paper tiger to have been true.

Leaving Iraq may save American lives in the short term, to be sure. But in the next war we will pay for our mistake many times over. Allowing Iraq to fall into anarchy is not in our interests, it isn’t in the Iraqi people’s interest, and it isn’t in the interest of world peace.

If we believe in values like democracy, freedom of conscience, and human rights, we are obligated to defend them in Iraq. If we fail to do this, ultimately we will prove ourselves unworthy of them.

Via Instapundit comes another great round-up of advice for incoming 1Ls. There’s some good stuff there. I also recommend Patrick J. Schlitz, On Being a Happy, Healthy, and. Ethical Member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and. Unethical Profession, 52 Vand. L. Rev. 871 (1999) — not only because he’s a former member of the St. Thomas faculty (now a federal judge), but because it is an excellent piece on how to avoid burnout. Then again, we’ll see by May how well that advice holds up…

Meanwhile, I did find some success in getting a backpack for law school. I ended up with the SwissGear Synergy laptop backpack — the construction on it seems quite substantial, and the only downside to it is that it doesn’t have wheels. However, it does manage to fit in two casebooks plus my citation manual, plus my pocket copy of Blacks, with a good amount of room to spare. It’s a bit on the expensive side, but the fact that it appears to be less likely to fall apart before the end of the year is a nice benefit. It seems to strike the right balance between holding everything I need and being too unwieldy to take through the skyway system.

Of course, being a Mac fanatic user, I had to get a nice shiny new MacBook. My trusty iBook G4 still works fine, but being able to have more screen real estate is important, especially when I can have one side of the screen for my reference materials, and another for my outline. The MacBook is a bit larger than the 12″ iBook, but it seems lighter and is quite a bit thinner. It has everything I liked about my iBook and adds quite a bit in terms of processor power and features. I would highly recommend getting 1GB of RAM however, as that makes a huge difference in performance, and is crucial if you intended to run Windows through Parallels.

Not only that, the new Intel Macs come with the absolutely excellent OmniOutliner. My study techniques have always involved writing hierarchal lists, which is what OmniOutliner does very well. My plan is to use it with a three column setup - one column with my outline, one column for associated cases, and another for questions I might want to bring up later. I’ll be curious to see whether or not this setup works well in class.

Of course, I’m not the only one who is a Mac-using law student — fortunately the exam software St. Thomas uses (Securexam) appears to work on Macs, so long as Microsoft Office is installed. I’m not sure if that works with Intel Macs, which use Rosetta to translate the PowerPC code of Office into Intel-compatible code, but if worse comes to worse I can install Windows and Office through Boot Camp, which should be acceptable. More and more are allowing Macs to use exam software, either through native clients or through Boot Camp on the newer Intel Macs, but not all do. As always, if you’re not sure what your law school requires, it’s a very good idea to ask.

One of the benefits of having been a blogger for the past five years is being able to read large amounts of material and analyze it critically — there’s a reason why top-notch bloggers happen to be in the legal profession. Writing, like anything else, is a skill that gets better with practice. I’m hoping that five years of blogging will be a help in having the analytical skills necessary to make it in the legal field — but we’ll see how well they apply.

I’ll try and provide more observations and notes as I go along…

The Washington Post has an editorial on why Judge Taylor’s NSA decision is such a poor work of legal reasoning. The WaPo finds the decision to be lacking in legal justification:

Judge Taylor’s opinion is certainly long on throat-clearing sound bites. “There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution,” she thunders. She declares that “the public interest is clear, in this matter. It is the upholding of our Constitution.” And she insists that Mr. Bush has “undisputedly” violated the First and Fourth Amendments, the constitutional separation of powers, and federal surveillance law.

But the administration does, in fact, vigorously dispute these conclusions. Nor is its dispute frivolous. The NSA’s program, about which many facts are still undisclosed, exists at the nexus of inherent presidential powers, laws purporting to constrict those powers, the constitutional right of the people to be free from unreasonable surveillance, and a broad congressional authorization to use force against al-Qaeda. That authorization, the administration argues, permits the wiretapping notwithstanding existing federal surveillance law; inherent presidential powers, it suggests, allow it to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance on its own authority. You don’t have to accept either contention to acknowledge that these are complicated, difficult issues. Judge Taylor devotes a scant few pages to dismissing them, without even discussing key precedents.

It is quite clear that Judge Taylor came in with a decision already in mind. The paramount obligation of a member of the judiciary at any level is to evaluate a case in the most objective way they can. There will always be bias in the process, but that bias was so blatant in this case that it is an embarrassment to the bar itself. Judge Taylor did not objectively or fairly adjudicate the arguments presented to her, and her decision betrays a complete lack of intellectual engagement with the arguments being presented.

The Post is right — even if one disagrees with the TSP, Judge Taylor did not do her cause justice with this decision. And if a federal judge cannot provide justice, that is an indication that person does not take their job with sufficient seriousness.

Jay Cost has a great piece on why summer political polls aren’t a very good predictor of election results. I’m inclined to believe his argument. Most people aren’t paying much, if any, attention to politics. The generic ballot always favors the Democrats to varying degress. Cost is right in that summer polls often have a higher percentage of non-voters than polls conducted closer to the election as it’s harder to determine voting behavior when we’re several months out from a mid-term election.

I do think there is a great deal of voter hostility towards the Republicans at the moment, and I do find it likely that the Republicans will lose seats in the House. I find it plausible, but less likely that those losses will result in a loss of control of the House. The Democrats don’t have the kind of compelling political message that the Republicans did with the “Contract for America” in 2004, nor do they have the sort of leadership that the Republicans did. Nancy Pelosi is hardly a figure who appeals to the values and sensibilities of Middle America.

Of course, the GOP isn’t doing much better. Voter apathy could be quite high in this election, despite the minority of vehemently anti-Bush voters that dominate the political news. The reality is that American politics are in a shameful state, and partisanship overwhelms all. Many of those polled in these summer polls are rightfully fed up with the way in which Washington has lost touch with the rest of the country — however, it remains questionable whether a choice between two parties who haven’t gotten their acts together will be enough to motivate voters to take action.