Susan Rice, the most “qualified” Barack Obama adviser, was on MSNBC’s Morning Joe moments ago explaining how Barack Obama’s “timetable” to retreat from Iraq is not the same as a “fixed deadline”.

Say what?

So, if you intend to leave Iraq 16 months from today, then - barring a rift in the space-time continuum - you are expecting to depart on a particular day, 16 months from now.  We get a new detail, too - Obama wanted to pull out of Iraq so that more troops could go to Afghanistan. Considering that he chairs a subcommittee with oversight authority over NATO forces in the Afghan theater. and has yet to hold a single hearing on the topic, this line of rationale reeks of disbelief. That Obama was willing to lose a country that functions as the lynchpin of Middle Eastern stability in order to stabilize the Afghanistan government is small comfort.

Susan Rice also poo-pooed Henry Kissinger’s editorial in The Washington Post today which, in a fittingly diplomatic way, described Obama’s position on Iraq as asinine

Establishing a deadline is the surest way to undermine the hopeful prospects. It will encourage largely defeated internal groups to go underground until a world more congenial to their survival arises with the departure of American forces. Al-Qaeda will have a deadline against which to plan a full-scale resumption of operations. And it will give Iran an incentive to strengthen its supporters in the Shiite community for the period after the American withdrawal. Establishing a fixed deadline would also dissipate assets needed for the diplomatic endgame.

No matter what Rice says, saying we will leave Iraq in 16 months means…we will leave Iraq in 16 months. Kissinger’s analysis is not rocket science - one does not have to have spent decades in diplomatic circles to understand it. It is logically very simple. Most worrisome is that Barack Obama seems completely unable to comprehend it. The only explanation that makes any sense of Obama’s Iraq position is the McCain camp’s retort that he is willing to lose a war to win an election. Indeed, he is steadfast in it.

The only thing more ridiculous than Obama’s ideas is the way his surrogates have to defend them.

Barack Obama’s most recent take on Iraq, found today in the editorial section of The New York Times, offers the nation a perverse resolution to America’s Iraq involvement (more…)

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The Iranian propaganda machine is in need of improvement

Does Iran’s state media use Photoshop? The charge has been leveled before. So far, though, it can’t be said with any certainty whether there is any official Iranian involvement in this instance. Sepah apparently published the three-missile version of the image today without further explanation.

(more…)

Yet another blow to the cretins who believe we liberated Iraq for its oil

Iraq will award contracts to 41 foreign oil firms in a bid to boost production that could give multinationals a potentially lucrative foothold in huge but underdeveloped oil fields, an official said on Sunday.”We chose 35 companies of international standard, according to their finances, environment and experience, and we granted them permission to extract oil,” oil ministry spokesman Asim Jihad told AFP.

Six other state-owned oil firms from Algeria, Angola, Pakistan, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam will also be awarded extraction deals, Jihad said.

I guess that means we need Vietnamese companies to drill in ANWR, then, since we won’t let our own.

I am only prompted to write this after having watched MSNBC for the last half hour this morning, and seeing that MoveOn.org “Alex” ad about five times.

Look, you “3 million” MoveOn.org members (I use quotes, just in case they are using “Million” Man March math), the military is a voluntary entity. And anyway, the Department of Defense hasn’t quite gotten to the point where they send toddlers into battle - that’s the other side, the Muslim extremists, who blow up children in their twisted efforts to advance their religion.

Iraq is not Vietnam. Repeat, Iraq is not Vietnam (rinse, repeat, and repeat again). The only person to propose re-instating conscription is Charlie Rangel, a New York Democrat. There are absolutely no similarities to the Vietnam conflict, other than our military is in a foreign land, which is hardly historically remarkable. The gloomy view of the future wrought by MoveOn.org against poor “Alex” is grounded in some alternate, ideologically skewed reality. The force size in Iraq is smaller by multiples than it was in Vietnam. The casuality rate, and the casualties themselves, do not compare. The enemy is not a surrogate for an enemy super power. The enemy has no government, and the desert is a heck of a lot harder to hide in than the Indochina jungle. Thinking of Iraq as Vietnam II requires a certain reliance on anecdotal reasoning. The similarities are immaterial.

Hence, “Alex”’s mother is just not that bright.

Then again, what if all this moot. Say that“Alex” is a patriot, and wants to serve his country when he grows up. Maybe he will be a Marine. In that case, MoveOn.org (or whatever bastardly progeny has taken its place by then) will still have the right to spend millions of dollars saying inane things on cable news.

And for it, they would be able to thank people like Alex.

Technorati tags: John-McCain, Election-2008, war-on-terror, Iraq, Del.icio.us tags: John-McCain, Election-2008, war-on-terror, Iraq, LiveJournal tags: John-McCain, Election-2008, war-on-terror, Iraq

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Barack Obama is unqualified to lead our nation’s foreign policy. His world is a much safer place than actually exists.

He will speak to the most despicable heads of state without qualification. He believes that Iran is not the USSR, so therefore, we should have tea.

Well, the Soviets were the biggest of enemies. Relatively speaking, just because the Soviet Union no longer exists, it does not follow that we should put Iran in their place. The policy of an American president ought not be to promote distasteful regimes to points of prominence because there is no one worse. The Soviets had an aura of self preservation about them – Islamic fundamentalists suffer no such illusions. Islamists’ place is an eternity that cares not if major Western cities are nuked. Barack Obama wants to chat, at the highest level, making the presidency of our country no more valuable than a wannabe caliphate that makes its women wear head scarves in the 110 degree heat. He will kick sand and ride a camel, and in the process, embarrass us all.

Obama is a foreign policy disaster waiting to happen. He claims he will not speak to Hamas until they denounce their stance on Israel’s destruction. Even then, he should not be the one talking to them. He doesn’t get that.

Here is what he actually is. He is a senator that defeated Alan Keyes, imported from Maryland, to take the place of a governor candidate disqualified because he wanted to have kinky sex with his wife. Barack Obama is qualified to be a community leader in northern Illinois, most unprepared for anything much more than that. His mentor hates America, and his wife on only likes her country if her husband is elected to lead it. He hasn’t disagreed with any of it, any more than required by the punditry (which is deficient enough, if you ask me).

For all the Democrats’ pronouncements on the purposes of diplomacy, their current standard bearer seems to have zero understanding as to the world as it exists today. The American people are smarter than this. Barack Obama’s beliefs run counter to those that founded our country. His foreign policy would violate every studied and established rule of negotiation diplomacy ever established. He is dangerous. He must not win.

President Bush chides Democrats for their unconditional surrender stance on the war in Iraq, comparing it to the appeasement of the Nazis. Obama strikes back, calling Bush’s comment the “politics of fear.”

How… trite.

George W. Bush is right

Speaking before the Knesset, Bush said that “some people” believe the United States “should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.”

“We have heard this foolish delusion before,” Bush said. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

Understandably, Barack Obama doesn’t like his policies being aptly compared to one of the largest strategic blunders in world history. But then, the truth often hurts. If Obama has a better description of his Iraq withdrawal plan, based in reality and not fueled by hopeful irrationality, I would sure like to hear it. The sadness is that there is no other accurate description of it. One certainly cannot say he strongly opposes the terrorist forces in Iraq while advocating that we cease confronting them. Instead, he wants to “talk” with those who are uninterested in reason. With Obama, it’s as if that “positive parenting” nonsense would become our foreign policy.

Anyhow, not to say Obama supports Hamas, but there are certainly good reasons Hamas supports him.

Technorati tags: barack obama, road to the white house, politics, Iraq, Del.icio.us tags: barack obama, road to the white house, politics, Iraq, LiveJournal tags: barack obama, road to the white house, politics, Iraq

UPDATE More Democrats act indignant

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that Bush’s remarks were “beneath the dignity of the office of the president and unworthy of our representation” at the celebration of Israel’s 60th anniversary.

…

As Pelosi was speaking, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel issued a statement in which he said: “The tradition has always been that when a U.S. president is overseas, partisan politics stops at the water’s edge. President Bush has now taken that principle and turned it on its head: for this White House, partisan politics now begins at the water’s edge, no matter the seriousness and gravity of the occasion. Does the president have no shame?”

Both are peculiar things to say, especially from leaders of the legislature, which remains significantly less popular than the president. If anyone knows what it means to be “beneath the dignity of the office”, it would be Nancy Pelosi, the most incompetent House speaker in recent memory, whose recent field trip to Syria makes her seem more than just a little bit ridiculous. Second to all that, I am sure that Congressman Emanuel realizes that the president is the commander-in-chief and chief diplomat. Encouraging one of our staunchest allies of his commitment to the region, and his hatred of appeasement, can only be a good thing. If that makes you feel bad, tough luck.

All the same, I find this amusing. When wimps are called out for being wimps, they get mad. Certainly they can find a way to channel that rage, and in the process, stop being wimps. These Democrats are rightly noted for their appeasement tendencies and they feign the most comical of outrage. You wanted to leave Iraq yesterday? That is called surrender. Or the redeployment of courage, or whatever euphemism you can concoct to hide the bitter tasting truth that today’s Democrats haven’t the stomach to fight for much of anything.

Related posts: Should We Kick West Virginia Out of the Union?, Taxing Crazy, Not-So-Great Expectations, Rosalind, Oh Rosalind, Obama, Testy - Hillary, Feisty

A new website has been launched that is chronicling events as they actually happen in Iraq, IraqStatusReport.com. This sort of effort dovetails well with Joe Lieberman’s lament this morning before General Petraeus’ testimony that no good news is deemed acceptable out of Iraq.

Not that all is good in Iraq - no serious minded individual believes that. But the seeming unwillingness by many to recognize any progress at all in a very difficult region and context demonstrates, in my view, an exceptional lack of seriousness. The media can’t take off the Vietnam-era glasses long enough to care to get it right. This web effort is a move in the right direction.

Iraqi patriotism

Three Iraqi soldiers threw themselves on a suicide attacker wearing an explosives vest at an Army Day celebration Sunday - an act of heroism the U.S. said likely prevented many more deaths. Iraqi police said at least 11 people were killed in the blast, the deadliest in a series of bombings in Baghdad.

…

These martyrs gave their lives so that others might live,” said Lt. Col. Steve Stover, a U.S. military spokesman.

If this is the quality of character of the individuals now signing up to join the Iraqi military, things will be getting much better a lot quicker.

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Facts and statistics are pointless to look at in a vacuum. Numbers are facts. Truth can be found in trends. Someone needs to tell that to The New York Times, and maybe mention it to prospective Columbia doctoral students

MANY Americans and Iraqis feel that 2007 was the year the war in Iraq turned around: the “surge” strategy has pacified large sections of the country; previously hostile factions like those of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr and the sheiks in Anbar Province have dropped their opposition or even sided with American and government forces; and the number of insurgent attacks has dropped steadily. Still, numbers don’t lie: for those in uniform, 2007 was the deadliest year since the invasion.

First, there is a tell. We know we’re dealing with a liberal anti-war advocate because she starts her thought with the word “feel”. That needs to be edited.

Second, the aggregate number, no matter what the subject, is secondary to where the numbers are going. A true look at the data shows amazing improvement since May, 2007, when 126 American fatalities were reported. Following a monthly linear trend down, in December, 2007, 23 American soldiers lost their lives.

New York City averaged 41 murders a month in 2007. Los Angeles averaged 28. If the trend continues (and seven months of data is instructive that it will), there will be twenty-one states more dangerous to Americans than Iraq in 2008. That comparison sounds like a more compelling, truth telling factoid to me.

Yes, 2007 was a record year for American fatalities in Iraq, but both the Times and someone pursuing an advanced degree at an elite American university know that that’s not the story.

UPDATE Proof that The New York Times understands the concept of statistical trends, at least when blaming Republicans for economic troubles

On Friday, the Labor Department reported that employment in December had buckled as well. Over all, a meager 18,000 jobs were created. Even worse, hiring in the private sector contracted by 13,000 jobs, a harbinger of recession. The figures are subject to change, but job growth has been slowing since June, making a big upward correction unlikely. The unemployment rate, which is not subject to revision, also jumped in December, rising to 5 percent. As recently as last March, unemployment was only 4.4 percent. Such a big swing in such a short time also suggests a recession.

Take note of this instructive subject lesson on the distinctions between convenient truths and inconvenient truths.

A lesson has been learned. The lighter, faster response military model advocated by Donald Rumsfeld has it’s place, but not when dealing with a vicisously sectarian, force focused culture. In other words, Bush’s surge is showing consistent, trend-worthy results, not least in the area of record low American casualty figures

Of the 21 fatalities this month, 14 have been combat related. Since the surge, even Iraqi security force fatalities are signficantly down. al Qaeda is disbanding, and American, Iraqi and coalition losses are shrinking. Hopefully, with increasingly more breathing room, the Iraqi politicians can produce some statesmen, and establish a working federal government.

The most impressive part of the new information coming out of Iraq is the utter and nearly total defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq, and even more encouraging, that American officials are convinced that al Qaeda, not sectarian violence, is presently the main concern in the country. Iraq is not in the midst of a civil war. It is not Vietnam. In fact, the dissimilarities have been there since the beginning. Unless, of course, you were a bit slow on the uptake, and part of the Democrat leadership. Harry Reid, circa February, 2007

After months of heated rhetoric slamming President Bush’s Iraq policy, the Senate’s top Democrat moved into new terrain by declaring the Iraq war a worse blunder than Vietnam.

“This war is a serious situation. It involves the worst foreign policy mistake in the history of this country,” Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, told CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer.”

“So we should take everything seriously. We find ourselves in a very deep hole and we need to find a way to dig out of it.”

Asked whether he considers it a worse blunder than Vietnam, Reid responded, “Yes.”

Comparisons to Vietnam are nothing new, but a “worse than” designation from a top lawmaker is.

Reid never supported the surge, by the way.

When Iraq’s government is stable and fully functioning, Joe Lieberman will be the only Democrat to thank. And for a time, even he was kicked to the curb.

As a side note to the topic of winning in Iraq, do you really want to vote for “abandon the world, now” Ron Paul? Or, for that matter, the apologizing Mike Huckabee, who wants to further destabilize Pakistan, and now fears a Pakistani immigrant invasion?

Foreign policy is too important in 2008 to not occupy billing number one on everyone’s political radar - well, it’s always too important, actually. It’s the lack of a foreign policy as the discussion de jour in the nineties that has exacerbated some problems in the 2000s.  Even with Paul and Huckabee, and Obama, it’s not the lack of foreign policy experience that bothers me about them, but more so an apparent lack of judgment.

I’ll have more thoughts on it later, more related to how the presidential candidates respond throughout the day than how things are evolving on the ground in Asia. As usual, the best place on the web to follow developments is Drudge.

Pakistan was already a mess. Now it’s a nuclear empowered bigger mess. I don’t think there’s much more expert analysis needed, and I’m not one to offer it. Muslim fundamentalists executed a pro-Western, female candidate for prime minister, largely because she was female, and had threatened to do so multiple times before. I’m not among the surprised.

UPDATE More from Bob Krumm

Byron York opines on the potential political fallout of the Bhutto assassination. He contends that this hurts Iowa frontrunners Huckabee and Romney, helps Giuliani and McCain, and would help Fred Thompson if more people were paying attention to him. By the same logic, someone else it helps is Hillary. That’s because we will be reminded that very recently Obama had some very naive things to say about Pakistan.

Add this to the recent Iowa polling, and Michelle Obama may prove to be quite the distinguished prophetess.

Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY) was the first liberal to attempt to sway the Iraq debate by proposing the reinstatement of the military draft. Many lefty leaning commentators have echoed similar sentiments, hoping to reignite their fondly recalled protests of the Vietnam era. Others claim that only a draft can make the war “fair”. As they see it, too many minorities and poor people are fighting in Iraq, ensuring the rest of the country does not feel it. All of course is propaganda of the worst quality.
There are many reasons the vast majority of the country does not feel sacrifice from the war in Iraq. Chief among them is that we are a civilian government with a voluntary army, small by historical standards. However, even those who are affected are not restricted to a particular socio-economic class or race as many draft manipulators advocate.

Today Tennessean columnist Saritha Prabhu takes another shot at advocating the draft to end the war.

Yes, I know we have a volunteer army, but there are a bunch of things people who hide behind that argument don’t want to talk about: how the armed forces is overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, made up of people who are from rural, opportunity-deprived areas, or who join for economic reasons.

The rural part is true, though I’ve never thought of rural as being a bad thing. The rest is, well, a stretch. Many studies have been done debunking the preconception that those who enlist in the military are “opportunity deprived”, i.e. poor and/or black. Using zip code data, Tim Kane makes a good case to the contrary

The plain fact is that the income distribution of recruits is nearly identical to the income distribu­tion of the general population ages 18?24. Because we lack individualized household income data, our approach does not indicate whether or not the recruits came from the poorer households in their neighborhoods. Nevertheless, Chart 3 shows that the difference between the 1999 recruit distribution of ZCTA income and the population distribution is below a single percentage point for 19 of the 20 income brackets. Yet even these slight differences show a sub­tle pattern: Proportionally, both poorer and richer areas provide slightly fewer recruits, and middle-income areas provide slightly more.

Individualized household data would be better, as Kane admits, but increases in enlistment among areas of all economic classes is certainly more compelling than the “poor military” model, which is parroted mercilessly absent any data. Prabhu continues

If there were a draft, you can bet there would be some collective growing up and more people asking some tough questions: about what exactly our “mission” in Iraq is, about those benchmarks, about a sanitized war, about the large-scale misuse of funds and much more.

There are millions of us who have “collectively grown up” and know the mission, and are educated regarding the geopolitical landscape sufficiently well to support continued involvement in Iraq, understanding not just the risk in Iraq, but the broader stakes of regional failure. Clarity in discussion is important, though. There is certainly a difference between debating the mission and the conduct of the mission, a distinction which Prabhu seems more than willing to blur to make her point.

There is this perverse movement afoot by some liberals to expand the feelers of this war in order to end, not win, it, thinking that if George W. Bush’s daughters were soldiers in Iraq, the war would instantly be over. Simplistic sure, and wrong as well.

The draft advocate position does not spring from some noble desire to better the debate. There is this hope for mass protests, and the march of otherwise insufficiently occupied college students to end a war they do not like and do not understand (the only thing that impresses me less than a Ph.D is a student protest). This truth bears out in a variety of ways, but primarily that draft advocates will never be caught recognizing publicly that an influx of draftees would reduce the effectiveness of the military, an opinion held throughout the Pentagon. More draftees involve more people who didn’t want to fight, refuse to train well, and are unreliable in combat, all causing more casualties than someone who has volunteered to be there. Of course a draft might help end the war in Iraq, but would do so at unacceptable longterm costs, and not for the noble reasons its advocates represent.

Columbia University has now supplanted its competitors in the upper echelons of higher education as the bellwether of intellectual dishonesty.

In fact, the lead may be insurmountable, unless of course the ghost of Stalin starts to hold vigil on the streets of Cambridge to debate the importance of purges in efficient communistic administration.

By now everyone knows that Columbia has invited Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on its campus, a Holocaust denier, religious Islamist fundamentalist, and proud advocate of Jewish destruction. Just last year the leadership of Columbia University viewed such positions as less offensive than the United States’ military’s recruitment policies.

In short, Jewish genocide is less offensive than “don’t ask, don’t tell”.

Really?

Apparently. Columbia University might as well start a symposium on the subject and invite Jeremiah Munsen to discuss his views on the inferiority of other races and the proper role of Africa in international relations. It’s just free speech, right?

Which is a trap door. Free speech is not the real issue. Institutions all the time decide that certain opinions are too far outside the acceptable realm of discussion, whether it is the forbidding of ROTC recruitment on campus, or the denial of a former Harvard president to speak to a state university governing board because he dared comment that women simply didn’t like science as much as men do. Do not be fooled that Columbia is acting as a neutral forum. If they found Ahmadinejad’s statements and policies distasteful, he would have already been disinvited. American academia has long snuffed out the torch of free speech on its campuses.

Add to that a Columbia University dean John Coatsworth’s sua sponte admission that Adolf Hitler would have been welcome prior to the beginning of World War II (pre or post the invasion of Sudetenland, we’re not sure), and we have quite the mess. The rationale there, I suppose, is that we wouldn’t have been at war with Germany yet, or more invidious, that anti-Semitism is simply okay (I suppose someone should tell the dean Mein Kampf was published sixteen years before American involvement in the war). The lynch pin according to the dean is that he would have to be subjected to a discussion, which seems more label than substance. There will be no substantive discussion - Ahmadinejad will stick to his genocidal, anti-American talking points like he has in every interview he has conducted.

Either way, we are de facto at war with Iran, and Columbia is playing the perfect patsy, giving Iran’s leader an American platform to crown his well-orchestrated media circus. It is not debatable that Iranian monies and weapons have been provided to the anti-government forces in Iraq. I know at this point it’s too late to demand that our academics reach a pro-American consensus. At the very least one of our top universities could muster enough willpower to stand up to an avowed religiously intolerant, genocidal racist.

For anyone who doubts the leftist slant of the mainstream media, let us move past voting records, and issue polls of journalists, and move directly on to in-kind contributions, in the form of discounted ad rates

The Times acknowledged to The Post on Wednesday that the going rate for such an ad would be $181,692.

But a spokesman for MoveOn told The Post that the group paid just $65,000.

Amid a firestorm of criticism yesterday, the Times seemed confused about the proper ad rate.

Earlier in the day, the paper’s spokeswoman said MoveOn had received a discount and confirmed to Reuters the normal rate was “about $181,000.” But later, the same spokeswoman told The Associated Press that the proper rate for such an ad is about $65,000.

Saying he wanted to place an advocacy group ad similar to MoveOn’s, a Post re porter who contacted the Times without identifying himself was told earlier this week that the rate was about $167,000.

“We do not distinguish the advertising rates based on the political content of the ad,” spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said, confirming that the normal rate was “around $181,000.”

Of course you don’t. That’s why MoveOn.org received somewhere between a 61% and 64% discount on its “aid and comfort to the enemy” ad attacking the commanding general in Iraq for not adopting its fabricated version of complete disaster in the Middle East.

Of course, the Times, being the upstanding bellwether of responsible and fair journalism that it is, will certainly offer the same discount rate to Freedom’s Watch. Or not. We will certainly see. There is no debate that the price for the ad that was sold to MoveOn.org was $65,000.00. The real fun will be watching the debacle when the Times explains in its answer to a certain shareholders’ derivative suit why it has cut its ad rates by 60% at a time of self-described declining circulation.

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