Category: Politics

Kerry Won’t Run In 2008

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.

The Speech Bush Should Give

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.

Nothing Succeeds Like Success

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.

Pawlenty Joins McCain Campaign

Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota has announced he’ll be the national co-chair of McCain’s Presidential bid. This isn’t terrifically surprising, as Pawlenty had been allying himself with McCain previously. Pawlenty is considered to be on the short-list of possible VP contenders in 2008, and his narrow win in the Minnesota Republican slaughter has ensured that he is known as a Republican who can compete in a blue state like Minnesota.

Attack First, Ask Questions Later

Glenn Reynolds has a rather shocking admission made by UPI reporter Pam Hess on CNN’s Reliable Sources:

KURTZ: Pam Hess, has the sending of 20,000 additional troops gotten a fair hearing in the media or has it gotten caught up in this wrenching, emotional debate about whether the war itself was a mistake?

PAM HESS: I think it’s gotten caught up about it, and the debate about it is actually all wrong. What reporters know and what Martha says is that 20,000 really isn’t that big — isn’t that big a jump. We’re at 132,000 right now. It’s going to put us even less that we had going in going across the line.

What we’re not asking is actually the central question. We’re getting distracted by the shiny political knife fight. What we need to be asking is, what happens if we lose? And no one will answer that question. If we lose, how are we going to mitigate the consequences of this?

It’s so much easier for us to cover this as a political horse race. It’s on the cover of “The New York Times” today, what this means for the ’08 election. But we’re not asking the central national security question, because it seems that if as a reporter you do ask the national security question, all of a sudden you’re carrying Bush’s water. There are national security questions at stake, and we’re ignoring them and the country is getting screwed.

That’s right — for the press, it’s irrelevant what information is the most important in determining the course of American policy — it’s all about bashing Bush. The Ahad-like fixation the President means we’re not getting the whole story. No one is questioning what would happen if we were to withdraw from Iraq. Even though that question is profoundly important for the future of this nation and the Middle East, it’s taboo because it’s politically incorrect to be asking such questions.

The media no longer cares about objective reporting, giving people the truth, or asking tough questions. It’s all about scoring cheap political shots and vapid celebrity news. The media is utterly broken, and for all the talk about how terrible Fox News is for actually reporting stories that might be perceived as friendly to the Bush Administration, the mainstream media is perfectly willing to distort the news or ignore crucial stories that don’t fit their ideological agenda.

Talk Is Cheap

Apparently, I’ve made the official John Kerry blog, and even get some choice John Kerry quotes to try to change my mind. As blogger Violet Bliss Dietz notes:

Jay, as JK pointed out, “Conversation is not capitulation. Until recently, it was widely accepted that good foreign policy demands a willingness to seize opportunities and change policy as the facts change.”

Which is all well and good, except that statement is rather tepid. Yes, good foreign policy does demand a willingness to seize opportunities and change with the situation. The question is whether negotiating with Syria gets us anywhere. Unfortunately, the Assad regime is diametrically opposed to American interests in the Middle East. In terms of Lebanon, they don’t want to see Hizballah be disarmed. Hizballah is a joint creation of Syria and Iran. It exists specifically to keep pressure on Israel and expand Syrian and Iranian influence. Now, Senator Kerry is quite right to say that the US should do more to support the Lebanese government. However, one must also realize that the Syrians have every interest in undermining that government. A strong Seniora government would undermine Syria’s influence in the region. Furthermore, the very last thing that the Syrians want is a strongly democratic state on their borders — which is why they are working so hard to undermine the nascent democratic movements in Iraq and Lebanon. It’s similar to the classic problem of the security dilemma — a state which democratizes tends to increase the pressure for democratization in other surrounding states. If you’re an autocrat like Bashar al-Assad, do you want a functioning democratic republic next door that has free multiparty elections? Especially if that state has a better quality of life for its citizens then yours? In order to understand the political situation in the Middle East it’s important to understand just how dangerously revolutionary the idea of democracy — an idea which we take for granted — really is in that country.

Ms Dietz continues:

JK’s outlook on talks with Syria was clear in this AP story: “Talking to somebody is not rewarding their behavior. I have no illusions about our differences with these countries … and nothing in the discussion is based on trust,” said. “But you cannot get to (action and verifiability) without setting up the modalities. So you have to engage in some dialogue.”

Now, although I’m trying to act in the spirit of comity here since I’m a bit flattered that the Kerry people are trying to engage with people on the opposite side in a serious and respectful manner, but this statement strikes me as somewhat incoherent. The first sentence is true, and it is something that conservatives could stand to learn: the mere fact that you choose to negotiate doesn’t necessarily show weakness. What makes a difference is whether you’re negotiating from a position of strength or not — when Reagan engaged with Gorbechev at Reykjavik in the 1980s it was from a position of knowing that he was in a position of strength and he had a pragmatic partner on the other side.

The problem with our relations with Syria is that the Syrians know we’re not in a position of strength right now, and Assad’s has no reasons of pragmatism to do what we want him to do. Assad knows our military is bogged down in Iraq and we have a government that has lost much of its trust with the people. We’re constrained, and Assad knows it. We can give him plenty of carrots, but what sticks do we have in the region? As much as I’d love for us to be able to take the Assad regime out and institute a democratic state in Syria, that just is not going to happen. It seems just as unlikely that we can put substantial diplomatic pressure on Syria, sanctions are unlikely to work, nor do we have the means to significantly hurt the Syrian economy.

Kerry also admits that he understands we have our differences with Syria, which I’ll attribute to tact rather than dramatic understatement, and that his discussions were not based on trust. Which, when one parses that statement, is quite a slam to the Syrians. One of the things I’ve always learned about negotiation is that if you don’t trust the person you’re negotiating with, you can’t get anywhere. To negotiate with someone you know will not act in good faith is usually a less than productive exercise. If Kerry really doesn’t trust the Syrians to act in good faith, then all he’s doing is wasting his time. Now, if he’s arguing that it’s important to have contacts in Syria who might be willing to help, that’s one thing — but if John Kerry (or anyone else for that matter) thinks that they can go in and single-handedly get Syria to change their position on being a state sponsor of terrorism and undermining the Lebanese government, I have bridge in Brooklyn to sell them.

That gets to my biggest critique of Kerry’s position on this (and his foreign policy in general) — talk is cheap. Just establishing a “dialogue” doesn’t do much if you can’t expect anything productive to come out of it. “Dialogue” isn’t valuable in its own context. To make it so puts process over results. Yes, it would be nice if we could sit down with the Syrians over tea and come to an agreement in which Syria would stop exacerbating the situations in Lebanon and Iraq. It also isn’t going to happen unless the consequences of noncompliance are so high that Syria has no other viable alternative. We don’t have that kind of force. We can talk ourselves blue, but Syria has no reason to budge unless there’s either a very big carrot or a very big stick involved. And if we start offering carrots, we have to be able to assure that the Syrians won’t take them and still support Hizballah under the table — which would still require a big stick.

Now, I do give Senator Kerry credit for making Lebanon a bigger issue. On 99% of issues I disagree with the Senator, but he is right on this. If he thinks that someone needs to be a stronger advocate for the Lebanese people in the US government and he wants to take the job, he should do it. Senator Kerry is absolutely right on one thing: the Seniora government needs to be able to provide the services to its people that Hizballah does if we want to have a prayer of defeating Hizballah. The Administration should offer its full support to any bill Kerry wishes to propose towards that end. We should be supporting the Lebanese people in their struggle against foreign domination and the anti-democratic forces that threaten to plunge their fragile democracy back into civil war. Regardless of political affiliation, every American should stand behind that principal, and Senator Kerry is right to make it a key issue.

However, we also must realize that the politics of the Middle East are still based on power arrangements. “Dialogue” alone cannot move us forward, especially when our interests run counter to the interests on the other side of the table. If we can’t trust the Syrians to do the right thing, then we can’t have good-faith negotiations with them. The Assad regime has every interest to sabotage democracy in their region, and if our goal is to negotiate the Syrians out of defending their interests, we’re not going to find much success.

Gerald Ford – 1913-2006

Former President Gerald Ford has passed away at the age of 93. Ford had the unenviable task of leading the country in the wake of the Watergate scandals, and he did it with integrity. His decision to pardon Richard Nixon, which probably destroyed his Presidential career, was the right choice. He handled his difficult period in office with integrity and helped America move forward during a difficult time.

RIP