Jay Reding.com

USA Today has an interesting piece on Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN)’s recent trip to Ramadi, Iraq the provincial capital of al-Anbar province and one of the former centers of the insurgency in Iraq. What Ellison has to say is extremely interesting, especially coming from an anti-war Democrat:

Ellison said that local leaders in Ramadi told him of how they partnered with U.S. and Iraqi military officials to virtually rid al-Qaeda from the city. Although the lawmakers had to travel in flak vests and helmets, “we did see people walking around the streets of Ramadi, going back and forth to the market.”

There have been fewer anti-U.S. sermons as the violence has been reduced, Ellison said, and religious leaders meet regularly with U.S. military officials.

“The success in Ramadi is not just because of bombs and bullets, but because the U.S. and Iraqi military and the Iraqi police are partnering with the tribal leadership and the religious leadership,” he said. “So they’re not trying to just bomb people into submission. What they’re doing is respecting the people, giving the people some control over their own lives.”

Ellison said he was particularly impressed watching Maj. Gen. Walter Gaskin, U.S. commander in the Anbar province, greeting people with “as-salama aleikum,” meaning peace be upon you.

“And they would respond back with smiles and waves,” Ellison said. “I don’t want to overplay it. There were no flowers. There was no clapping. There was no parade. But there was a general level of respect and calm that I thought was good.”

If Rep. Ellison is saying something good about the progress in Iraq, that means a great deal. He’s still advocating for a withdrawal timetable, but has said that he’s willing to give the generals on the ground more flexibility as to when that timetable should be. Given that Ellison is the first Muslim in Congress and a representative of the extremely liberal Fifth District, to have him go to Iraq and say that real progress is being made is something of a watershed.

Rep. Ellison has a chance to be a true leader in the House — if he genuinely wants to ensure that the Iraqi people are not abandoned, he has to be willing to stand with the American troops who are putting their lives on the line to help the Iraqis. That means that he may have to stand against the withdrawal-at-any-cost caucus within his own party and in his own district.

What is going on in Iraq is much more complicated than the simpleminded view given to the American people by the mainstream media — as Rep. Ellison noticed during his trip to Ramadi. Much of what our troops are doing in Iraq is the kind of humanitarian work that is necessary towards restoring Iraq’s shattered infrastructure and building a new sense of civil society in Iraq. The Iraqi people don’t hate us — they understand why we’re in Iraq and that we want to leave as soon as possible. What they fear the most is not that we’re there, but that our absence will widen this already terrible conflict.

Rep. Ellison’s comments are crucial towards forging a new bipartisan consensus on Iraq: neither side wants to stay in Iraq any longer than necessary. However, those of us who understand what the consequences of withdrawal would be do not want to leave Iraq in a state of chaos, which would be the inevitable result of a premature withdrawal. Iraq’s civil institutions and society have to be resilient enough to stand on their own, or else all we have done is thrown Iraq to the wolves.

Rep. Ellison has an opportunity to stand with the people of Iraq and allow the US to finish what we started. If he wishes to be a voice for the Muslim world in the House, this is his chance. There are 26 million people in Iraq whose fates depend largely on what we do in the next few months — they need a voice in Congress willing to stand for them and ensure that they are not forgotten for partisan reasons.

To see someone who represents the liberal wing of the Democratic Party willing to look at the situation in Iraq with new eyes is heartening. However, Rep. Ellison must be willing to have the political courage to do what is right in Iraq, not what is popular.

The IRS and FBI have raided the home of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), the man (in)famous for the “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark and “series of tubes” speech. Sen. Stevens has proven himself to be an embarrassment to the Senate, and it’s not all that surprising that one of America’s worst politicians would be at the receiving end of a corruption investigation.

Politically, this is not good for the GOP, as Larry Kudlow points out. The GOP lost in 2006 largely based on the corruption issue, and keeping someone like Stevens around continues that liability. Stevens should have a fair chance to defend himself, but if there’s any evidence of official corruption, Senator Stevens should be cut loose.

The GOP needs to clean house before 2008 — it’s not good enough that the Democrats are every bit as bad, if not worse. The GOP needs to return to its roots as a party of limited government and fiscal discipline, and that requires ensuring that every member of Congress strongly supports those values. Sen. Stevens has amply demonstrated that he does not, which is why the GOP should fully and completely support any investigation that results and ensure that the rule of law trumps any political considerations. The GOP should have learned their lesson from the handling of the William Jefferson affair — supporting politics over the rule of law invokes the wrath of the voters, and it well should.

Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack have a report back from their trip to Iraq in The New York Times. Both of them find that the last few months have produced great progress in securing the country:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

The massive chasm between the rhetoric of our political classes and the reality of our soldiers on the ground has never been wider in the history of American warfare. At the same time the Majority Leader of the Senate arrogantly tells our soldiers that the war is lost, apparently they’ve failed to get the message, since they certainly don’t seem to see it that way.

The surge has produced some preliminary results: civilian casualties are down in Baghdad and a senior leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq has been captured. Baghdad’s infrastructure is slowly being brought up, people are feeling more and more safe in their neighborhoods, and places where there was once massive bloodshed are now peaceful — perhaps an uneasy peace, but far better than what preceded it.

However, the left keeps arguing that these metrics don’t matter — it doesn’t matter that the markets are open if there are still car bombs in Baghdad. The reality is that those metrics are the most important in understanding how this war needs to be fought and won. The goal is not to eliminate car bombings in Baghdad — that’s a task that will years. It’s easy for AQI or another terrorist group to put one together and find a deluded fool to kill himself. What is much harder is to keep the population of Iraq frightened into submission — and al-Qaeda is failing miserably at that task. When al-Qaeda finds themselves kicked out of al-Anbar Province, that’s a sign that the winds in Iraq are shifting.

The problem is that the American system of government is failing more than anything else in this conflict. David Ignatius has a challenging editorial in The Washington Post about this conflict:

Future military planners will have to recognize that American democracy, in which political mandates must be renewed in two-year increments, makes us uniquely unsuited to fight protracted counterinsurgency wars. Petraeus likes to observe that it takes, on average, at least nine years to prevail in such a war. If that measure is correct, Petraeus must know there is little chance that a frustrated and angry American public will grant him enough time for success. So the question is: How to extricate ourselves in a way that minimizes the damage to the United States, its allies and Iraq?

A good start would be for Washington partisans to take deep breaths and lower the volume, so that the process of talking and fighting that must accompany a gradual U.S. withdrawal can work. Some members of Congress argue that pressure for an American troop withdrawal will persuade the Iraqis to put aside their sectarian agendas, but the opposite is more likely to be true.

However, the partisan idiocy in Washington has less of a chance of dying down than does the conflict in Iraq. Given that, it’s not all that surprising that Congress’ approval rating is abysmal, while the military remains the most trusted institution in American society. It says a great deal about the state of American democracy when our democratic institutions are looked upon with disdain, while the military continues to have broad support. It’s not the military that has failed in Iraq — quite the opposite. It’s our self-serving and blindly partisan political institutions which have failed and continue to fail. Instead of a rational decision about what the best course of action is for Iraq, it’s all about securing only one victory: the next election.

Washington believes in nothing but rhetoric, while our soldiers have to face the reality in Iraq: that everything they’ve done, all the progress that they’ve made, all that they’ve fought for could be undone for the sake of political expediency back home. Our political classes continue to betray the troops, and seem to think themselves better judges of the situation in Iraq than those who bear the responsibility for this conflict on a daily basis.

The conflict in Iraq is going to be the sort of conflict that this country will face throughout the 21st Century — and if Iraq is a harbinger of how fragile our democratic institutions will be in the face of this sort of conflict, the 21st Century will be a bloody one indeed.

Ed Morrissey notes that Congressional Democrats are about to end up fighting a losing battle over executive privilege by filing contempt charges against two White House aides. As The Washington Post reports:

The House Judiciary Committee voted today to issue contempt citations for two of President Bush’s most trusted aides, taking its most dramatic step yet towards a constitutional showdown with the White House over the Justice Department’s dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys.

The panel voted 22-17, along party lines, to issue citations to Joshua B. Bolten, White House chief of staff, and Harriet E. Miers, former White House counsel. Both refused to comply with committee subpoenas after Bush declared that documents and testimony related to the prosecutor firings were protected by executive privilege. …

Republicans on the panel argued strongly today against issuing contempt citations, and Democrats shot down two proposed GOP amendments before voting for the contempt findings.

“I believe this is an unnecessary provocation of a constitutional crisis,” said Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.). “Absent showing that a crime was committed in this process, I think the White House is going to win an argument in court.”

Captain Ed observes:

Tony Snow rather forcefully responded to this development, calling it a singular event in American history, where the legislative branch will direct the executive branch — in the form of the federal prosecutor — to file contempt charges against itself. The Department of Justice reminded Congress that administrations of both parties have long held that Congress has no power to issue contempt citations for claims of executive privilege. Obviously, the current leadership in Congress doesn’t care.

It portends a showdown in the Supreme Court over the nature of executive privilege, and Sensenbrenner is correct. Absent any evidence of criminal conduct, the Supreme Court is highly unlikely to grant the legislative branch free rein to pursue contempt charges or to undo executive privilege. Nancy Pelosi will in all likelihood force a ruling that will firmly establish executive privilege and leave Congress with less power than it has had, after having finally called its own bluff.

The problem the Democrats face is that they have almost no chance of pulling this off — the courts are not going to rule that the Constitution allows Congress to charge the President or his aides with contempt outside the formal process of judicial impeachment. The best outcome that they could hope for is that the Supreme Court falls back on political question doctrine and refuses to take the case — but even that’s doubtful as this appears to be a matter of separation of powers rather than a political question.

The Democratic-led Judiciary Committee, on a party-line vote, is essentially asking the Executive Branch to serve a subpoena on itself. This is something that the Supreme Court has already found to be unconstitutional. In Bowsher v. Synar, 478 U.S. 714 (1986) the Court held that Congress could not fire the United States Comptroller General, as he was a member of the Executive Branch, and the only constitutional measure that the Legislative Branch has over the Executive is the power to impeach. Likewise, in Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919 (1983) the Court held that one branch of Congress could not enact a legislative veto over an action of the Attorney General as that violates the separation of powers under the Constitution as well as the Presentment Clause. U.S. Const. Art. I, § 7, cl. 3. The Legislative Branch cannot infringe upon the powers of another branch even if that branch agrees with the infringement. New York v. U.S., 505 U.S. 144, 182 (1992).

There’s a long line of very clear precedent that does not allow the Legislative Branch to command the Excecutive Branch to do anything, especially when the Executive Branch is exercising its constitutionally-mandated powers. The Department of Justice may have been inept in handling the firings of the U.S. Attorneys, but the Executive has the plenary power under the Constitution to fire U.S. Attorneys at whim and for whatever reason they choose. U.S. Const. Art. II, § 3, cl. 2. The Courts are not going to allow the Legislative Branch — especially one House Committee to interfere in the right of the Executive Branch to carry out its constitutional duties. The chances of the Democrats surviving the inevitable court challenge should they choose to pursue this foolish game are close to nil.

So why bother? Like nearly everything the Democrats have done in the last six months, it’s all about political theater. It could be years before a court challenge is fully resolved, and by then the Democrats will have already done the political damage that they’ve intended to do. Of course, such a ruling explicitly limiting the power of Congress in these matters will effect future Congresses, but it’s rather clear that the Democrats aren’t looking any farther than the next elections.

This kind of ill-advised political maneuvering is exactly why this do-nothing Congress has earned it’s abysmal approval ratings — while they engage in futile efforts to preen for the radical left by chasing after the Bush Administration, the nation’s problems like terrorism, Medicare reform, Social Security reform, transparency in earmarking, and other crucial matters go completely neglected. This Congress has become a joke, and they seem to have no idea that ultimately the punch line will be on them.

The father of Senator Norm Coleman has died at the age of 82. Sen. Coleman is the senior Senator from Minnesota.

Condolences to the Coleman family on their loss.

Michael Totten, blogging from Baghdad, has a fascinating look at life in one Baghdad neighborhood:

“This is not what I expected in Baghdad,” I said.

“Most of what we’re doing doesn’t get reported in the media,” he said. “We’re not fighting a war here anymore, not in this area. We’ve moved way beyond that stage. We built a soccer field for the kids, bought all kinds of equipment, bought them school books and even chalk. Soon we’re installing 1,500 solar street lamps so they have light at night and can take some of the load off the power grid. The media only covers the gruesome stuff. We go to the sheiks and say hey man, what kind of projects do you want in this area? They give us a list and we submit the paperwork. When the projects get approved, we give them the money and help them buy stuff.”

Not everything they do is humanitarian work, unless you consider counter-terrorism humanitarian work. In my view, you should. Few Westerners think of personal security as a human right, but if you show up in Baghdad I’ll bet you will. Personal security may, in fact, be the most important human right. Without it the others mean little. People aren’t free if they have to hide in their homes from death squads and car bombs.

The “surge” is making progress, but that progress is normally hidden from public view by a media unwilling to report on it. Not all Iraq is as peaceful as the Graya’at neighborhood of Adhamiyah, or we wouldn’t be needed. The goal is to make as much of Iraq like Graya’at so that we aren’t needed any more.

What’s more important to note is that the kind of work being done here, interacting with local Iraqis and developing networks that help us identify and stop the terrorists, can’t be done from Kuwait or Okinawa or by a Predator drone flying at 35,000 feet. If we don’t have a presence in Iraq, we can’t do the things necessary to make life better for the people of Graya’at or anywhere else in Iraq. At the same time, terrorists will have unfettered access and will turn Iraq into another Afghanistan — a totalitarian hellhole in which radically austere Islamic law is enforced with the barrel of a gun or the blade of a knife.

For all the talk about how there’s no “military solution” to Iraq, most of what goes on in Iraq isn’t combat — it’s the sort of economic and political development activity that Totten witnessed in Graya’at. That sort of local-level development is ultimately what matters most in democratizing Iraq — a state can have the best-designed government ever put in place, but still fail as a democracy unless there is a civil society to support it. The goal of the “insurgency” in Iraq has been to disrupt the formation of civil society in Iraq by keeping everyone in fear — and slowly but surely that campaign is failing.

Totten’s on-the-ground reporting is exactly the sort of thing that the mainstream media should be doing — but have largely chosen not to. We in the States don’t get a balanced picture of what happens in Iraq, and most people are basing their opinions off of misinformation, disinformation, and gut-level feelings based on those faulty premises. If the American people truly knew what was going on in Iraq and could see it for themselves, those polling numbers would be the exact opposite of what they are now. That’s a message I’ve heard time and time again from those who have been in Iraq, and thankfully independent journalists like Michael Totten are doing the critical work of getting the fuller picture out.

David Bernstein notes that the head of US intelligence has warned that Hizballah has established sleeper cells in the United States, ready to strike if the US engages in military action against Iran.

I’m not particularly surprised about this — Hizballah is responsible for the murder of US citizens in Beirut and Saudi Arabia, and they have the Iranian financial backing to pull off even more ambitious acts if they wanted to. Getting into the United States is trivial — even after September 11, our visa procedures are still quite lax, and failing that we have two very porous borders with Canada and Mexico that make it easy for a foreign national to slip into the country.

That being said, I’m not sure that their plans would work as intended — if it were found that Iranian-backed agents were launching attacks in the US, it would make the American populace more rather than less likely to want to punish Iran for their actions. Then again, given the way in which the cancer of the blame-America-first mentality seems to have metastasized in this country, it could be that Hizballah knows us better than we know ourselves — certainly that’s the view al-Qaeda has of us, and we’re giving them every reason to believe it correct.

UPDATE: As Power Line notes, Hizballah has no problem finding a base of financial support in the United States, which makes it much less surprising that they would also have sleeper cells active here.