Jay Reding.com

George Will makes the case:

Giuliani has a way to go before he can seal the deal, but he’s saying the right things. Conservatives can trust him to nominate judges who will follow the Constitution rather than reshape social policy from the bench. That’s what conservatives want to hear, and if Giuliani strongly makes that point, it will help him. There are still going to be questions about Giuliani’s position on abortion and gun control, but I don’t see those as being fatal to his campaign — unless he bombs them.

Giuliani’s biggest asset is his leadership — he did great things for the City of New York, and he’s a tenacious when it comes to getting things done. This country needs someone like that. Even if Giuliani alienates some on the social right, he can also bring in many moderates, and it’s the moderates abandoning the GOP in 2006 that cost the Republicans control of Congress.

The US military is authorizing the military to hunt down and kill Iranian operatives in Iraq:

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The “catch and release” policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran and yet intimidate its emissaries. U.S. forces collected DNA samples from some of the Iranians without their knowledge, subjected others to retina scans, and fingerprinted and photographed all of them before letting them go.

Last summer, however, senior administration officials decided that a more confrontational approach was necessary, as Iran’s regional influence grew and U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran appeared to be failing. The country’s nuclear work was advancing, U.S. allies were resisting robust sanctions against the Tehran government, and Iran was aggravating sectarian violence in Iraq.

Indeed, the evidence is as close to a “smoking gun” as there can be — Iranian agents are actively working to undermine Iraqi sovereignty and assist terrorist group in killing US forces. These acts are tantamount to acts of war, and the US is well within their right to treat Iranian forces as the combatants that they are.

We have to take the gloves off in this war, and this is a positive sign that we are doing exactly that. Iran’s complicity in the conflict in Iraq is undeniable, yet Iran has suffered few to no consequences for their actions. The only way to secure Iraq is to prevent these foreign interlopers from feeding sectarian tensions and supporting terrorist groups. That requires us to put a great deal of pressure on Iran to stop — including the use of military force.

Sen. John Kerry has decided not to run for the Presidency in 2008 — a smart move on his part. Bush was a vulnerable candidate in 2004, but Kerry was the absolute wrong person for the Democrats to have picked. Kerry lost the security vote with his “global test” rhetoric and his Boston brahmin demeanor alienated others. Bush’s win was less a testament to his strength and more a testament to the weakness of the Democrats in that cycle — just look what happened when the Democrats got organized and the GOP faithful stayed home.

Kerry just isn’t the sort of person who can reach out to the American people in a nationwide election — he’s far better off playing the role of elder statesman within the Democratic party — which seems to be what he’s now trying to do.

Mitch Berg has an excellent dissection of Barbara C. Crosby’s op-ed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on why she calls for mandatory service. I’m not opposed to the idea per se — in fact, I could easily see mandatory service as a positive for society. The problem is that if one wants to make the argument that it’s good for the military, they don’t understand the way in which the US military works. Mitch Berg explains:

Ms. Crosby seems to think that military is like high school - a captive audience that needs to be exposed to a bunch of abstruse concepts for their own good, as judged by society.

It’s not. It’s an arm of the government that tries to kill, maim or drag to the bargaining table by force those who would do us harm. It’s a specialized trade, with skills and standards that occupy mens’ lives for decades in the learning. The professionals that make up the backbone of our military, the greatest on earth, devote their lives to learning the craft and art of war every bit as much as any other professional - and their lives depend on it more than most.

And that is what’s missing from Ms. Crosby’s piece; any sense of what a military is for, and why it exists. Is it a social program? A vehicle to engineer society?

The United States of America has a professional military. There’s a very good reason for that — because being a soldier in the 21st Century is a highly specialized skill. It’s not about taking some 18-year-old, throwing them into basic training, giving them a rifle, and telling them to point it towards the enemy. To be a member of America’s fighting elite (and they are elite), one has to train for years, be able to use complex equipment, have an in-depth knowledge of tactics and strategy, as well as have a wide background in linguistics, cultural affairs, diplomacy, ethics, engineering, and politics. The average soldier in Iraq not only has to be able to survive on a hostile battlefield in an alien country, but do so in a way that follows the complex rules of engagement every soldier must follow.

The left has a view of the military as being a bunch of hapless stooges who got shipped off to Iraq because they couldn’t make it in “normal” society — witness what John Kerry said about the troops last fall. That patronizing view is completely ignorant of the reality of today’s military. Our soldiers are professionals who have highly specialized skills and have been given the benefit of years of training. Very few people can be successful soldiers, especially in a modern battlefield.

The military isn’t like high school — it’s not a place for mandated government instruction in citizenship. It’s a professional arm of the United States government, and deserves to be treated as such. Mandatory service, while not a bad idea in itself, doesn’t work when applied to the military because an effective military requires trained, motivated, and skilled volunteers. We don’t need conscripts because conscripts tend not to be effective soldiers. Expecting to plunk down someone straight out of basic into a place like Iraq and have them fight isn’t realistic. It would not only weaken the military, but destroy the espirit de corps that keeps our military together.

The United States military is an elite brotherhood that is rightfully set apart from society and held as a higher organ than the rest of society. The threats of the future require a trained force of professionals, and only a segment of our population has the requisite skills. The arguments for some kind of mandatory government service makes sense if you want to instill people with a sense of personal responsibility for the body politic — but if the goal is to help the military, the best way to do that is to recognize our troops for the professionals they are and stop treating the like children.

Michael J. Totten has the heartbreaking story of Hizballah’s campaign of destruction across Lebanon today. Hizballah is trying to rip the fragile Lebanese democracy apart, and the international community has done little to nothing to stop them.

Senator Kerry is right — we’d be far better off supporting the fragile democracy in Lebanon against the predation of Hizballah than we would in supporting the Egyptian autocracy. The Seniora government needs all the help it can get, especially when Hizballah is able to pull off things like this. The West has turned a blind eye towards this vicious group of terrorist thugs for too long — we should be going after Hizballah as well as their Syrian and Iranian masters, and making it quite clear that they will be punished for this sort of action.

Of course, that consensus doesn’t exist, and meanwhile the pall of thick smoke signals what could well be the preface to yet another destructive bout of civil war for the long-suffering people of Lebanon.

Jules Crittenden gives the President the speech he should give tonight:

I’ve heard all the comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. George Bush’s Vietnam. The myopia is astonishing, even for me, George Bush, who you all think just isn’t that smart. But I learned something in school: People who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Didn’t you learn anything from Vietnam? Didn’t you see what happened when your predecessors in Congress, disgruntled and responding to public opinion polls just like you are, voted repeatedly to undermine an ally that was fighting for its survival and making headway against evil? There, I’ve said it again. Millions of people were murdered or imprisoned.

And then, those who wished us ill … the evil-doers … evil, evil evil … took advantage of our weakness.

Sadly, I rather doubt that the President has the political convictions to make such a speech. We’ll get another laundry list of largely meaningless domestic programs that will only further exacerbate the sad state of American government. Sadly, boldness is no longer a notable quality of this Administration.

Still, the President should lay it on the line. If we fail in Iraq, it won’t be a failure just for George W. Bush, it will be a failure for America. The political narrative of “Iraq=Vietnam” was never predestined — but was a self-fulfilling prophecy among those who at some level wanted America to lose for their own political gain. The future of the United States and indeed the stability of the world has been sacrificed on the altar of partisan politics. For all the talk now about how we needed a larger military there was no political imperative from either side for that to happen. The Democrats have done nothing but sit on the sidelines and complain and the Republicans have failed to lead. The Union is suffering because of it.

I’m getting to the point where I’m starting to believe that the only thing that will wake America up to the reality of today’s world is if the sort of terrorism that plagues Iraq or Israel moves over to our shores. What is truly sad is that each passing day in which American power suffers friendly fire from Washington hastens exactly that. President Bush would be well within his right to call that behavior out — sadly, he seems to lack the initiative to do so, and from his weakened political position, it would be unlikely to help even if he did.

ABC News notes the obvious — that President Bush’s approval ratings are in the toilet. Indeed, Bush’s strength even among members of his own party is waning. It’s not a pleasant situation for a President to be in — even a lame duck one. Most of this disapproval comes from the war in Iraq.

Glenn Reynolds has some cogent thoughts about why this is:

I also think that Bush’s loss of support on the war stems from the loss of visible forward motion. The casualties aren’t the problem (we’ve lost fewer troops in nearly four years than we were expected to lose in the initial push to Baghdad), so much as the sense that we’re taking casualties and nothing is happening. This impatience is perhaps unfortunate, but it’s a well-known characteristic in the Pentagon (where people were talking about the “three year rule” on support for wars back in 2003) and the Bush Administration doesn’t seem to have had a strategy for dealing with it.

I agree. We’re not making enough visible progress to keep the American public supporting this war. Part of that is because we have a media that wants America to lose, the consequences be damned. We have a Democratic Party that is increasingly backing the enemy in demanding a pullout, and when you have years of constant negativity with pathetically little attempt to correct the record, this is exactly what will results. The Bush Administration hasn’t led. Our soldiers are fighting bravely, and there’s little doubt among our troops that the war in Iraq is quite winnable. But the Administration isn’t backing them up.

Bush doesn’t have the killer instinct he needs. We should have never ceded forward momentum in this war, but Bush hasn’t pushed nearly hard enough on Iran and Syria. As Prof. Reynolds says, when our enemies know that the costs of their actions are so cheap, they will continue to cause problems for us and the Iraqis. So long as the Iranians know we’re not going to touch them, they’ll continue developing nuclear weapons and arming terrorists in Iraq.

As General Patton was fond of saying, the three elements of successful warfare are audacity, audacity, and audacity. We began in Iraq with an audacious goal — establish an outpost of democracy in the Middle East. Yet we didn’t do all we could to see that goal completed. We didn’t secure Iraq, and we didn’t do enough to develop the civil society that is a precondition for democracy. In the absence of civil society, the organizing unit of Iraq became the gang — the Mahdi Army has been causing us problems for years because we keep backing off. If the US Army had gone into Najaf and killed Moqtada al-Sadr dead on the spot, Iraq would be much more peaceful. That would have sent the message that the price for committing terrorism in Iraq was death, and it would have been a lesson that would have been learned well. Unfortunately, we’ve been far too reticent to hunt down and kill the people who cause terrorism — and when the price of terrorism becomes cheap, you get more terrorism.

Bush’s approval ratings could well go up if the surge is successful — and for the sake of both Iraq and the United States, it had better be. Nothing succeeds like success, and the lack of visible success in Iraq is the albatross around the President’s neck.

It may be well too late for Bush to find his fighting spirit again, especially now that the feckless defeatist Democrats have taken power. However, losing Iraq is infinitely worse than losing temporal political points — Bush’s one saving grace is that he isn’t willing to back down even though that would be the politically expedient thing to do. We cannot afford to lose Iraq, and we’re already facing a future in which American power will be more constrained by petty politics than ever before. Even if we manage to stabilize Iraq, the Bush Administration’s inability to vigorously prosecute this war will only make it harder for us in the future.